


Special Topics in Mutant Studies

by populuxe



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies)
Genre: Academia, Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Professors, Alternate Universe - Still Have Powers, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Jewish Character, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, M/M, Marijuana, Politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-22
Updated: 2020-12-22
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:55:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 24,184
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28228761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/populuxe/pseuds/populuxe
Summary: The trouble with Charles Xavier isn’t just that he teaches genetics and holds terrible views about mutant rights—it’s also becoming increasingly clear that everyone but Erik seems to love him.
Relationships: Erik Lehnsherr/Charles Xavier
Comments: 36
Kudos: 175
Collections: Secret Mutant Madness 2020, cherik





	Special Topics in Mutant Studies

**Author's Note:**

  * For [bettysofia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettysofia/gifts).
  * In response to a prompt by [bettysofia](https://archiveofourown.org/users/bettysofia/pseuds/bettysofia) in the [secret_mutant_madness_2020](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/secret_mutant_madness_2020) collection. 



> **Prompt:** _There is no one and nothing Erik loathes more than that ridiculous new professor Charles Xavier. Well, maybe Santa and the entire holiday season, but Xavier is a damned close second._
> 
> Thank you for this prompt, bettysofia! I loved writing the aggrieved Professor Lehnsherr. I hope you enjoy it. <3
> 
> Also a million thank yous to my real-life professor friends (and professor-adjacent friends, especially F!), who gave me some *incredible* responses during the research process (though please note that every character and scenario in this fic is totally fictional lol). And, of course, thank you to the world’s best beta, [1degosuperego](https://archiveofourown.org/users/1degosuperego), who encouraged me to take this prompt—and then helped me pull it together just under the wire.

Erik is just stepping out into the late-summer heat when his phone vibrates. He glances at the lock screen and answers it quickly, using his powers to whisk his earbuds up into his ears.

Ororo skips right over the pleasantries. “Great news—I just got off the phone with Moira.”

“And she’s agreed that we don’t need to replace Deborah,” Erik suggests hopefully. Ororo lets out a laugh.

“What’s it going to take to convince you we need someone from the sciences?”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Irrefutable evidence that science has mutants’ best interests at heart.”

“Even though I suspect you’ll keep answering it,” Ororo says wryly. “I’ll remind you once again: that was a rhetorical question.”

Now it’s Erik’s turn to laugh. He crosses past the football field, where a lone man at the far end is carefully re-painting the lines, and turns onto a side street that cuts up to the main drag.

He’d always liked Ororo—since he started teaching at the College, Erik’s made an effort to be friendly with all mutant faculty and staff—but around this time last year, when she took him out for coffee and suggested that they team up to help the College develop a Mutant Studies program, their friendship truly blossomed.

Now, after a year of endless proposals and exploratory committees and bureaucratic hoop-jumping and several tense moments when Ororo had to physically stop him from pulling down specific administration buildings with his powers, she’s become one of his closest friends.

“Moira _was_ calling about Deborah’s spot, though?” Erik prompts.

After all that hoop-jumping, their Mutant Studies pilot is slated to launch this coming semester—or at least it was, until winged biologist Deborah Kowalski, the pilot group’s only representative from the hard sciences, received an extremely selective, extremely last-minute grant to study birds in Antarctica.

“She has feathers!” he’d shouted into the phone when Ororo had called him with the news. “The only birds there are penguins!”

Ororo had said something about how she was pretty sure penguins had feathers, too, and besides, she probably a felt kinship with all birds, but the truth was, Erik didn’t really care about Deborah Kowalski or her research—he hadn’t seen the need to include anyone from the Biology department in the first place. But he’d fought Moira on her desire for “true interdisciplinary collaboration” for months; she’d never let them move forward without a replacement.

“Yes,” Ororo says. “There’s a new Biology hire. Totally unrelated to Deborah’s sabbatical—he has a different area of focus, and he was set to start this semester anyway.”

“And he’s a mutant?”

“Mmm hmmm—apparently he was already planning on teaching at least one mutant-focused class, too.”

Erik finds that he’s intrigued in spite of himself. “What’s his mutation?”

“Moira didn’t say.” Ororo pauses and adds in an almost challenging tone, “Does it matter?”

“Fine, fine,” Erik concedes. “Obviously it doesn’t.”

He stops at the intersection by the main entrance to the College to wait for the light. Compared to the shady side streets, the direct sunlight overhead makes it almost unbearably hot. September can’t come soon enough.

“Anyway,” she continues. “Moira says he’s very enthusiastic about the pilot. The timing’s tight, but we’re all back in town now—ideally we can meet in the next few days.”

“And maybe with the short notice, he’ll be happy to go along with everything we have planned.”

Ororo laughs. “Combative already, I see.”

“I just want to give the students a good experience,” he says loftily.

“Yes, that sounds like you.”

Erik smiles as he crosses over to the sidewalk that runs along the length of the town common. He waits to respond as a beat-up old car trundles past making an awful grinding noise; with a little concentration, he can feel that something’s seriously out of whack with the car’s transmission.

“Where are you?” Ororo asks.

“On my way to the coffee shop,” he says. “I have some emails to answer.”

“Ah—you’re going somewhere with functioning air conditioning.”

“Oh, is there air conditioning there?” Erik says nonchalantly. “An added plus.”

Ororo laughs as she says, “When are you going to admit that being too stubborn to get an air conditioner was a mistake?”

“Oh look, I’ve arrived,” he says loudly, even though the coffee shop is still a block away. “Talk to you later.” He hangs up before she can get another word in.

Students won’t return to campus for another few weeks, but somehow, the coffee shop is still packed. Erik collects his coffee at the end of the counter and does a sweep with both his powers and his eyes before resignedly heading towards his least-favorite spot: the communal table.

On a whole, it’s a fine establishment—competently brewed coffee, a pleasing amount of stainless steel, and best of all, a wine bar in one corner that opens precisely at five o’clock—but as the elderly man a few seats over lowers his newspaper to give him a nod and a wave, Erik contemplates braving the patchouli-infused bullshit at the town’s other coffee shop just to have a table of his own.

He’s pretty sure the man is retired faculty—one of the languages, maybe—so he nods back and then opens his laptop in what he hopes is a clear signal that their social interaction has ended.

He has thirty new emails, six of which are additions to Tripp Porter’s department thread, which Erik has been refusing to click on for three days now. He opens and answers a few of the easy ones—the registrar for a clarification on a course listing, one of his co-authors about an upcoming journal deadline, his mother trying to remember the name of a movie he’s never seen but has heard her talk about at length.

One of the most recent emails is from Jean—a link to an article in _The Atlantic_ accompanied by the message, “Your hate read of the day.” The URL contains the words “mutant” and “drugs” and “children,” and Erik gears up to be enraged as he clicks the link.

“Pardon me,” a voice says. “Do you mind if I sit here?”

Erik looks up at the owner of the voice: he’s a youngish man, and an extremely attractive one at that, dark-haired and fair-skinned, with full lips and a sweep of freckles across his cheekbones. His eyes are an almost unreal shade of blue.

A beat passes, and then the man clears his throat. “Sorry,” he says. Erik faintly registers that he has a British accent. “I don’t mean to crowd you,” the man continues. “It’s just that this side of the table is far easier to…”

He trails off as he gestures downwards, and Erik must truly be in a daze, because he hadn’t seen or felt the wheelchair the man was using until just now. He glances at the long stretch of open table to his left and realizes the space to navigate between the chairs and the brick wall is fairly narrow—and the only other seat is directly across from him.

“Oh,” he says, trying to shake himself out of his stupor. “Sorry, yes. Of course.”

The man chooses to ignore Erik’s fumbling, pulling forward and giving him a dazzling smile. “Thanks,” he says, setting his cup and saucer on the table and then nudging the chair that was across from Erik to make room. “I promise—you won’t even notice I’m here.”

Erik nods and looks back at his computer without really registering what’s on the screen. A few moments later, he decides to steal another glance—and finds the man already watching him. They both look away quickly.

In an attempt at distraction, Erik tries to remind himself of how much he despises the communal table. This was meant to be his time alone, to sit in the air conditioning and avoid responding to tedious emails and catch up on his hate reading—not to surreptitiously glance at frustratingly attractive strangers sitting only a foot away.

He forces his attention back to the article, now open in his browser, and immediately regrets it. One glance at the headline—and the frankly offensive illustration of a crazed-looking kid with flames shooting out of his palms—confirms that this thing is exactly as bad as he thought it was going to be.

As he skims it, he grows angrier with every subsequent paragraph—it’s a mishmash of logical leaps, cherry-picked statistics, and dubious “expert” quotes arguing that suppressant use should be revived in schools, so teachers can “help our most vulnerable kids.” He scrolls back up to click on the author’s Twitter feed—baseline, as he suspected, and she’s written a long, pearl-clutching thread about how important she feels her own work is, “for our mutant children.”

“Oh, fuck _off_ ,” he mutters.

“Sorry?”

Erik looks up to see the man staring at him in concern.

“Oh, not you,” he says quickly. He gestures at his computer. “Just some hack journalist endangering mutant lives for clicks.” He rolls his eyes and adds, “Must be a day ending in ‘y.’”

The man gives him a questioning look.

“A terrible article in _The Atlantic_ ,” Erik explains. “About bringing back suppressants in schools.”

The man’s expression clears, and he nods. “I read that this morning, actually.” One corner of his mouth quirks up and he adds, “Not a shining example of rigorous methodology, I agree, though it’s still an important conversation.”

Erik narrows his eyes. “What?”

“Suppressants,” the man says with a shrug. “The difference between modern pharmaceuticals and the stuff they were using in the 80s and 90s is night and day. But we let that era’s mistakes dictate our current response, rather than thinking about what could help today’s kids the most.”

Erik stares at him in disbelief, his anger slowly ratcheting upwards. “Are you a mutant?”

The man raises an eyebrow. “I think everyone has a right to an opinion on this question,” he says evenly. “But yes, I am.”

That makes Erik even angrier. “How can you…”

“…want to help mutant children control their powers?” the man finishes.

“Control.” Erik spits out the word. “That’s exactly it.”

“Well, yes,” the man says slowly. “Plenty of mutants have a hard time controlling their powers, especially when they manifest.”

“So they should have better access to training,” Erik shoots back. “ _Everyone_ should—not just the ones who can afford private mutant-only schools.”

“I agree,” the man says. “But that kind of training can take years. What about the kids who don’t want to hurt their classmates in the meantime?”

“There we go,” Erik says, throwing up his hands. “It’s always about how dangerous—”

“Some powers are dangerous!” the man interrupts, raising his voice. “You’d have to be a fool to pretend that wasn’t true.”

Erik sits back in his chair, folding his arms across his chest. “You sound just like them.”

The man doesn’t need to ask who “them” is—and he’s starting to look angry, too. “Why do I get the sense that you’re about to compare me to some famous mutantphobe?”

“You must be psychic,” Erik sneers. “Because I was.”

The man’s eyebrows draw together and his mouth folds into a small, tight frown. He still looks infuriatingly attractive, which only enrages Erik further.

After they spend a good ten seconds glaring at each other, the man glances around the coffee shop. Erik follows his gaze—it’s just as packed as when he arrived.

“Look,” the man says. “When the next table opens up, I can—”

“Don’t bother,” Erik cuts in. “I’ll leave.”

He shuts his laptop and very deliberately lifts it with his powers. The man’s eyes widen as it flies through the air and lands neatly in his bag, which he zips up with a dramatic wave of his hand.

The man looks up from the bag to meet his gaze, his eyes still wide. “That was—”

“Something to _control_ ,” Erik snaps, and before the man can say anything else, he stands and marches out of the coffee shop without a backwards glance.

*

It only takes ten emails to sort out a time for the pilot group to meet the new Biology professor, which has to be some sort of record.

Erik considers Googling “Charles Xavier”—he can admit he’s at least a little curious about the man’s research and his powers, even though they’re probably about as interesting as Deborah Kowalski’s—but then he decides to give himself one last weekend of not thinking about any of this until they meet Monday morning.

By Friday evening, the heat’s finally starting to break, so he heads out to the porch to drink a beer and roll a joint and glare at Porter’s house across the lawn. It’s been totally devoid of life since Erik got back into town a few weeks ago, a sure sign that Porter and his wife are still on Cape Cod.

He finally responded to Porter’s department thread this afternoon, though the satisfaction of it lasted for about an hour, until Porter sent him yet another email—this time a personal one, about his lease renewal, along with some extremely fussy details about garbage and recycling pickup.

As he seals the joint, Erik directs a specific glare at Porter’s stupid recycling bins and once again questions why he’s chosen to rent an apartment from a man who’s both his department head and the most miserable bastard on campus—not to mention from someone who’s unironically chosen to use the nickname “Tripp” in professional settings.

“Because it’s cheap and you have extensive debt,” he mutters as he floats the ashtray and a lighter within reach. He lights the joint and closes his eyes as he takes the first hit.

One of the many good things about the Porters’ absence: he can sit outside and smoke a proper joint. During the academic year, he has to opt for something more discreet, unless he wants an outraged Emily Porter banging down his door—or worse, the kids from Mutant Haus swinging by to ask if they can join him.

(If he has to live near a dorm, he’s obviously pleased that it’s the mutant one, but he could do without them telepathically blasting their own drug trips, not to mention the regular “midnight naked runs” past his windows.)

In his hazy vision of the future, where he’s finally paid off his debts and finally has tenure, he’ll make sure his parents are settled and then he’ll buy one of the houses on the shady side streets leading into town. Any of them, really, just so long as he never has to see any of his students in the nude—or Tripp Porter collecting the newspaper in his bathrobe—ever again.

By the time he’s stubbing out the last of the joint, he’s definitely starting to feel it. He sinks down in his chair, closing his eyes and listening to the sounds of late summer in the country…the suburbs? Nothing like summer in Rego Park, anyway.

He’s debating whether he could manage to navigate another beer from the fridge to the porch with his powers—he can tell that he’s seriously stoned now, because all the metal in the apartment is blending together in a sort of warm, magnetic blur—when he feels a soft, familiar nudge at the surface of his mind.

He sits up straighter and tries to concentrate as he thinks, _Jean?_

_Erik!_

The projection is accompanied by a burst of fizzy enthusiasm—Jean’s version of drunk-texting, then. As long as they’ve been friends, Jean has opted for telepathic contact over phones, and Erik’s never particularly minded.

He tries to think clearly and deliberately, even though he knows that Jean could probably pick up even his vaguest thoughts from an almost scary distance. _What’s going on?_

 _I’m out for drinks with Charles,_ she sends back. _You should come and join us._

Erik frowns. _Who’s Charles?_

Jean sends a warm flurry of laughter as she projects, _Charles Xavier, the new Biology professor?_

Now he’s just confused. _How did you meet him already?_

 _I contacted him after I Googled him,_ she thinks. _He’s a telepath, too._

Before he can respond, she adds, _You would not believe how cute he is_ _._

Now he’s very confused. Is she on a date with him? Is she trying to set Erik up on a date with him? He tries to process this information, but his brain seems to be moving in slow motion.

“I’m extremely stoned,” he says aloud, and then he thinks, _I’m extremely stoned._

Her laughter fills his head as she projects, _Stay where you are, then. You’ll meet him on Monday._

 _That was the plan, right?_ He closes his eyes again and leans back, folding his hands behind his head. _Give him my regards._

Jean laughs inside his head once more and sends the sensation of a goodbye, retreating from his mind as quickly as she appeared.

A telepath, then—that means they’ll have two telepaths in their pilot group, which is more than a little strange. Erik tries not to succumb to the biases that even other mutants have about telepaths, though he supposes he should be grateful that he was argued out of most of those biases by his college best friend, Emma, long before he met Jean.

He mostly forgets about notably cute telepath Charles Xavier for the rest of the weekend. He spends Saturday finalizing the syllabus for one of his courses, an upper-level seminar he’s titled “The Mutant Body.” On Sunday, he goes for a very long run and then calls his mother and listens to her talk about plans for the High Holidays for more than an hour, only managing to get in a “Yes, that sounds good” once every few minutes.

But on Monday morning, he walks into the Dean of the Faculty’s office to find Moira, Ororo, and Jean all bent over with laughter—Ororo is actually wiping tears from her eyes—and sitting in the center of the group, a smug grin on his stupidly attractive face, is the man from the coffee shop.

He looks up at Erik and the grin slips away. “Ah.”

“What the hell are you doing here?” Erik demands.

Moira rolls her eyes. “And a good morning to you, too, Erik.” She gestures to the man. “Allow me to introduce the Biology department’s newest hire—”

“Charles Xavier,” the man says, looking almost apprehensive as he extends a hand.

Erik looks pointedly at Charles’s hand and then folds his arms across his chest. “You knew who I was in the coffee shop.”

Charles’s eyebrows draw together as he slowly lowers his hand. “Yes and no.”

“Is that some sort of telepathic—”

“ _Erik_ ,” Jean cuts in, accompanied by a firm mental sense of warning.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” he says sarcastically. “Telepaths get to play tricks but the rest of us—”

“I wasn’t playing tricks,” Charles insists, and then he sighs. “Look, can we just pretend we’re meeting for the first time?”

Erik opens his mouth to respond, but Moira beats him to it.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” she says, looking deeply unimpressed. “But if you’re about to say anything other than, ‘Nice to meet you, Charles, I look forward to working with you—’”

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” Erik interrupts. “Let’s just get this over with.”

He takes a seat at the far end of the table and uses his powers to float his steel water bottle out of his bag with perhaps slightly more flourish than is absolutely necessary, if Moira’s head-shaking is any indication. Charles is still watching him with an unreadable expression on his face.

“All right,” Moira says, using the “if you don’t start behaving I will take away your recess” tone that she wields so effectively at faculty meetings. “I trust you can work out whatever this is”—she makes a vague gesture at each of them in turn—“before the students arrive.” She glances at her watch and sighs. “To your credit, you did show up on time.”

As if on cue, Logan strolls through the door, walking at a leisurely pace and smelling strongly of varnish. He glances at Erik, then at Charles, then back at Erik, one eyebrow raised. “Making friends already, I see.”

Erik throws up his hands. “How am _I_ the—”

“Logan Howlett,” Logan says, crossing the room and extending a hand to Charles. “Fine Arts.”

As they exchange pleasantries, Erik can’t help but notice how good Charles looks when he smiles. He slowly compresses and then decompresses his water bottle, like a stress ball.

“Now that we’re all introduced,” Moira says as Logan takes the last seat at the table. “We’re here this morning to welcome Charles as a last-minute addition to the inaugural pilot of the Mutant Studies Program.”

Charles beams as he glances around the table, his expression only dimming slightly when he looks at Erik. “Thank you,” he says. “I’m very excited to be onboard.”

“And we’re excited to have you,” Moira says.

She turns to look directly at Erik, like she’s challenging him to disagree. He leans back in his seat and folds his arms across his chest.

“OK then,” she continues briskly. “Shall we begin?”

The initial pilot is a baby step of sorts—Ororo had to twist his arm until he finally admitted there was no other place to start. Someday, she promised him, they’ll have a full-on Mutant Studies Department; for now, to convince the administration, they needed to compromise.

The pilot group will teach the same mutant-focused classes they’d be teaching anyway, but the students who’ve signed up—twenty-five at last count—will be required to take classes across disciplines and do an independent study next semester. They’ll meet as a group in evening sessions every few weeks, for symposiums and debates and the occasional guest speaker.

Charles takes all this in with enthusiasm, asking a lot of questions and making the occasional suggestion, but Erik can’t help replaying their argument in the coffee shop as he thinks about the discussion topics they’ve planned.

It feels natural to collaborate with Ororo and Jean—after all, Political Science has direct intersections with History and Sociology—and while Logan’s stuff is a little further afield, it’s usually interesting, at least.

But it’s just so typical that the man who took a pro-suppressant position in the coffee shop turned out to be a Biology professor. This is exactly what Erik was talking about when he tried to convince Moira that they were fine without the sciences.

The meeting wraps up after about ninety minutes, and Erik thinks he behaved well enough, though Moira still frowns in his direction before she asks Charles to stay behind to sort through some paperwork. He floats his water bottle back into his bag as he watches Charles wheel towards Moira’s desk.

“Tip for you, bub,” Logan says, standing up and leaning towards him with an air of mock-confidentiality. “If you like him, you don’t need to pull his pigtails.”

“Oh, fuck off,” Erik snaps. “On what planet would I ‘like’”—he raises his fingers in air-quotes—“an integrationist, apologist—”

“Uh huh,” Logan interrupts. “Look, I didn’t say invite him to your radical mutant club meetings.” He roughly pats him on the shoulder as he adds, “You don’t need to do much talking at all.”

Erik rolls his eyes. It’s not worth responding—Logan’s already halfway to the door. He watches his broad, flannel-clad form retreat before he turns back to Ororo and Jean. “Ready to go?”

They exchange a glance, and then Jean says, “Go ahead—I’ll talk to you both later.”

As they descend the wide marble staircase of the administration building, Ororo says, “So are you going to tell me what Charles Xavier did to get on your extensive ‘Enemies for Life’ list, or…”

“We met last week,” Erik says wearily. “At the coffee shop, just after I talked to you. I didn’t know who he was until this morning.”

“And?”

“And he was an asshole.”

Ororo snorts. “Illuminating, thank you.”

Erik opens the building’s main doors with his powers and gestures for her to go first. It’s nearly noon, and the sun is relentless. He squints and shields his eyes; Ororo just smiles and casually raises her hands, palms up, and a cloud cover forms directly overhead.

He looks up and grins. “Thanks.”

Ororo waves him off. “Don’t mention it.” Her smile dims as she gives him a searching look. “You don’t have to tell me what happened—though until you do, I’m assuming it was something minor that you’ve blown completely out of proportion, because you’re a drama queen.”

“Excuse me—”

“But.” She holds up a hand. “I’m also going to need you to get over it as quickly as possible. For the sake of this pilot—and everyone else’s sanity.”

Erik folds his arms across his chest. “I will if he will.”

“He already is, you idiot,” she says, smacking him lightly in the arm.

“I will,” he says again, more seriously this time. “For the sake of the pilot.” He pauses and adds, “I didn’t sit through all those administrative meetings without murdering anyone just to tank this thing now.”

Ororo laughs loudly as she shakes her head. “You really are an idiot.”

Erik smiles. “You want to get a coffee?”

She puts on a mock-surprised face, raising one hand to her cheek. “Heading back to the scene of the crime?”

“Hey,” he says with a shrug. “I hear that place has great air conditioning.”

*

The students begin to arrive during the final week of August, and overnight, the campus feels completely different. It’s mostly freshmen at first, looking as alarmingly young as always, but soon, the upperclassmen start to show up—including the new crop of Mutant Haus residents.

Erik does find it fun to watch them move in, as they extend arms up to third-story windows, or balance half a dozen boxes stacked on top of one another. Plenty of them don’t have visible mutations, but a few clearly do—he spots one large boy covered in thick blue fur, and a smaller one with greenish skin and lizard-like spikes on his head.

But by the end of the weekend, they’ve woken him up three nights in a row with some sort of drunken sonic blast, and then a kid with super strength accidentally pulls down the entire fire escape, which leads a few of them to knock on his door Sunday morning to sheepishly ask if he could fix it—and maybe not mention it to the Dean.

He glances at the cluster of them watching him, wide-eyed, as he bends the iron back into shape. There was a time just a few years ago when he might have felt cool helping them out like this. Now, he’s just extremely tired.

“If you set something on fire,” he says wearily. “You’re on your own.”

The return of the students means the inevitable return of the Porters, and sure enough, Erik comes back from the grocery store late that afternoon to find them unloading their Audi in the driveway. He maneuvers around them to park, and as he climbs out to collect his bags, he prays that they don’t want to make small talk.

“Good to see you again, Erik!” Emily Porter calls out, barely making eye contact, and then she immediately retreats into their house. He inwardly cheers.

“Erik,” Porter says, nodding as he crosses the driveway. Erik tries not to let his disappointment show. “I trust you had a good summer. Fruitful for your…research?”

It’s that little pause, as though Porter isn’t intimately familiar with his work, and Erik just knows there’s some veiled mutantphobia in there, too, though Porter never comes out and says it.

“Extremely fruitful, yes,” he says. “I spent most of June in the Brotherhood’s offices in New York, actually. They’re doing incredible on-the-ground work.”

Porter winces slightly when he says “Brotherhood,” just as he always winces when Erik mentions his broader area of focus, mutant political organization. It’s the kind of wince that always provokes his internal Porter mantra: “Just you fucking wait until I have tenure.”

“Sounds fascinating,” Porter says blandly, not even trying for sincerity. He glances at the groceries in Erik’s arms and then makes a surprised face, like he hadn’t noticed them before. “So sorry—you should get those inside.”

Erik smirks and uses his powers to open the front door of the apartment. Porter’s eyes narrow.

“Looking forward to catching up at the department meeting this week,” Erik says, laying it on so thick that he’s almost certain Porter will spot the sarcasm. “I can give a full report on how the Mutant Studies pilot is shaping up.” He pauses and then decides to go in for the kill. “It’s just fantastic that Political Science will be a bedrock of the program.”

“Yes,” Porter says, his mouth pressing into a flat line. “It really is fantastic.”

Erik likes most of his colleagues well enough, and a few of them actually champion his work, which he suspects was a major factor in his hiring, given Porter’s ambivalence about his politics. And he’s trying, he really is—in the four years he’s been teaching here, he hasn’t been arrested at a single protest, which is more than he can say for either of his parents.

But Porter’s little facial expressions and offhand comments about mutants are like endless tiny pinpricks—not actually important, but deeply irritating. Sometimes it feels like some sort of test to see how much he can put up with before he snaps.

He tries to remind himself that Porter’s got to be pushing seventy and will hopefully be retiring soon, while the mutant kids in his classes—hell, even the baseline kids—have a lifetime of mutant politics ahead of them. It’s his job to give them the tools and the rhetoric to frame those politics—and if the commentators on certain cable news channels want to call that “radical mutant indoctrination on our university campuses,” well…he’s not about to argue with them.

Charles Xavier would probably say that Porter isn’t so bad, he thinks churlishly as he puts his groceries away. It’s not like Porter’s in the Friends of Humanity or anything. Even during the meeting in Moira’s office, he could tell Charles was a “two-sides-to-every-mutant-issue” kind of guy—room for “compromise” or some other bullshit centrist nonsense.

He uses his powers to shove a four-pack of beer into the fridge with so much force that two of the cans wind up dented. He slams the door shut with a huff.

Classes begin on Tuesday. Erik meets with one of his new thesis advisees in the morning, a smart, quiet teleporter named Hannah who’s been one of his best students the past few years. She wants to write about national borders and the spatial politics of teleportation, and he praises her initial outlined thoughts—she’s grinning as she pops out of the room at the end of their meeting.

In the afternoon, he teaches his first session of Intro to Mutant Politics, which he’s pleased to see is oversubscribed. There are a fair number of visible mutations in the room, and probably a lot of invisible ones, too, but he’d guess that there are also a lot of baseline students, if past semesters are anything to go by. The mix can lead to tension during discussion sections, although it’s rare that he gets an outright mutantphobe—they don’t usually make it past his first lecture. Mostly, it’s kids unlearning bad assumptions and misconceptions, which more than anything has him wondering what the hell is going on in these high schools.

But it’s his final commitment of the day that he’s most excited about: just before seven, Erik heads over to the History building for the Mutant Studies kickoff.

There are maybe a dozen students in the lecture hall when he arrives, milling around and picking over the same spread the College provides at every single event—fruit and crackers and a particular selection of cookies that Erik once found palatable but has now come to loathe.

Charles and Jean are there, too, down near the front; they’re both laughing, and Jean is leaning in close, her hand on the sleeve of Charles’s frumpy blue cardigan.

Maybe they _are_ dating. Telepaths would be drawn to each other, wouldn’t they?

They both look towards him in unison, and Erik frowns.

“Erik!” Jean calls out, smiling and waving enthusiastically. Charles’s wave is extremely tentative in comparison.

“Play nice,” Ororo says under her breath as she comes up from behind and passes him. Erik rolls his eyes and follows her down the stairs.

“How was everyone’s first day?” Jean says when they reach the front of the lecture hall.

“Oh, you know,” Ororo says with a laugh. “Just the start of another semester.”

“Well, it’s somewhat new for me, actually,” Charles says cheerfully. “I taught a bit during my postdoc, but this is my first full-time teaching position.”

Erik narrows his eyes. “How old are you?”

Charles looks at him warily. “Thirty-three.”

He doesn’t actually look thirty-three, but knowing that Charles isn’t some sort of wunderkind is almost a relief—though Erik still reserves the right to be resentful that he apparently waltzed right from a postdoc into such a top-tier position.

“I guess it’s not just another semester for you,” Ororo says with a smile. “How did things go?”

“Oh, quite well, I think,” Charles says. “I guess it’s hard to tell so early on, but my introductory genetics class seemed like a very engaged—”

“Genetics?” Erik cuts in. “You teach genetics?”

Now Charles is looking at him like he’s a small child, and not a particularly bright one. “Yes,” he says slowly. “I’m a geneticist.”

“Why didn’t you mention this at the meeting the other day?” Erik demands.

Charles looks extremely confused. “I don’t know, I assumed—”

“That Erik has Google like the rest of us?” Logan cuts in, appearing at Jean’s right shoulder. “A rookie mistake.”

Erik opens his mouth to respond, but Ororo claps a hand on his upper arm and says, “Save it. We need to get started.”

She looks out toward the lecture hall, where most of the students have taken their seats. Erik recognizes a handful of them—some of his best students are here, including Hannah and another of his advisees, Darwin, who’s sitting with the Mutant Haus contingent towards the back. The boy with the blue fur is at the end of their row, hunched over his laptop and studiously ignoring the rest of the group.

Erik glances back at Charles, who’s adjusting the position of his wheelchair slightly, waves of hair falling in his face.

Deborah Kowalski was bad enough, but at least she was an animal biologist. What sort of mutant chooses to join a field that spent decades conducting ethically dubious research on their kind? Not even the history of it—what about the things they do today, mapping the mutant genome, or worse, editing genes? Only a fool could fail to see what’s coming: it’s obvious that baselines want to eliminate the X-gene entirely.

Charles Xavier is exactly that sort of mutant, apparently. Maybe that’s why everything about him seems designed to project “innocence”—his cheerful smiles and his stupid oversized sweaters and his enormous blue eyes.

Erik forces himself to stop staring, crossing over to lean against the big wooden desk on the other side of the podium to put a good ten feet between them.

Ororo steps up to the podium and claps a few times to quiet the crowd. “Good evening, everyone,” she says into the microphone.

She glances over at Erik with a smile, and for a second, Erik forgets all about his anger, because this is the moment they’ve been working towards for more than a year. He smiles back.

“I’m so pleased to welcome you all,” she continues, looking back out at the students. “To the pilot of the College’s first Mutant Studies program.”

*

The trouble with Charles Xavier isn’t just that he teaches genetics and holds terrible views about mutant rights—it’s also becoming increasingly clear that everyone but Erik seems to love him.

He expected professionalism from Ororo, but when they meet to go over some details for the evening events later in the semester, she makes it clear that she genuinely likes Charles, too.

“He’s nice?” she suggests when Erik demands a list of reasons why.

“ _Nice_ ,” Erik scoffs. “Where does niceness get us when people are trying to—”

“All right, _try_ this,” she says, leaning back in her chair and folding her arms across her chest. “You wanted whoever filled Deborah’s spot to go along with all of our plans. Charles hasn’t put up a single serious objection.”

That’s true enough—if anything, he’s been very complimentary about the pilot set-up and the way it encourages students to step out of their comfort zones. Ororo even mentioned that Charles’s encouragement was the reason the blue furry mutant, Hank McCoy, had shown up for the second session of Erik’s intro class last week—apparently the first time he’d ever ventured outside of math and the sciences.

“Hank signed up for the program,” Erik had said dismissively. “He’s required to do that.”

Ororo had rolled her eyes and shot back, “Well, Charles didn’t have to send him to _you_.”

But Erik isn’t about to give Charles credit for that, or for his acquiescence around the program—what was he going to do, burst in at the last minute and try to overhaul the entire thing?

“Someday you’ll tell me what he did to invoke this grudge,” Ororo says, shaking her head.

“It’s not even about that,” Erik says. “It’s just…everything about him. You know what I mean?”

Ororo just looks at him blankly. “I really don’t,” she says. “Though I do wonder what goes on inside your head.”

He expected—well, he didn’t expect much from Logan, except maybe more teasing.

He and Logan have never been friends, though he does respect the man’s work—Logan had long used his mutation as a big “fuck you” to the art establishment, and then they gave him a MacArthur for it.

But one morning at the gym, a place Erik only sets foot in when the weather’s too bad to go for a run, he’s passing by the weight room when he spots Logan through the glass. Their small talk gives way to gentle ribbing before the conversation inevitably—annoyingly—turns to Charles.

“Say I take you at your word,” Logan says. “And this isn’t some sort of mating display.”

Erik’s fingers twitch at his sides as he catalogues in all the metal in the room. There’s a lot of it.

“Then I can’t figure out what your problem is,” Logan continues. “Chuck’s a good guy.”

“ _Chuck_ ,” Erik repeats.

Logan shrugs and swings a leg over the bench. He’s wearing a pair of shorts that are so short, they’re almost obscene. Erik has to forcibly tear his gaze away.

“Yeah. Chuck.” Logan stands and reaches for a nearby towel to wipe the sweat from his forehead. “He’s pretty interesting.” He tosses the towel, hard, and Erik catches it square in the chest. “Which you’d know if you bothered to actually have a conversation with him.”

Logan leaves him standing there, holding the towel and swearing under his breath. He lifts up the weight Logan was using with his powers and spins it like a baton before dropping it on the floor with a clunk.

It’s Jean that he expected to offer the most personal defense, because he’s eighty percent certain she and Charles are dating. It’s the twenty percent doubt that keeps him from outright asking—if she knows he’s thinking about it and still hasn’t said anything, there must be a reason.

He has her over for dinner on Friday—they trade off cooking for each other every few weeks or so—and they manage to get through the whole meal without mentioning Charles once. After dinner, Erik’s about to pour them each another glass of wine when Jean places a hand on his arm and says earnestly, “Do you have any more weed?”

He has no idea how baselines feel when they’re stoned, but beyond the effects on his own powers, he has a sense of how it feels for a telepath—they certainly let everyone around them know it.

Half an hour later, he gently tugs the vaporizer from Jean’s hand and takes one last hit before floating it to rest on the coffee table. He throws his head against the back of the couch, staring at the ceiling. Jean’s residual high is half pleasant, half terrifying, like slowly sinking into an endless psychic void—but a warm, gentle one.

“C’mon, it’s not that bad,” she says, and then she starts to giggle.

Erik had forgotten that she blatantly eavesdrops when she’s stoned, too.

“Yes, so I can hear you thinking about how I haven’t brought up Charles all evening,” she says. He lifts his head to look at her, and she smiles and adds, “I knew that before, you know. Your thoughts…” She waves a hand vaguely in the air. “Not subtle.”

“Fuck off,” he says, looking back up at the ceiling.

“For the record, Charles and I are _not_ dating,” she says loudly, and then she giggles again, blasting the sensation in his direction. It feels weirdly ticklish as it skips through his brain.

Erik ignores her and floats the vaporizer back over, setting it spinning in a lazy circle above his head. He doesn’t care whether Jean and Charles are dating. He doesn’t care who Charles dates at all. He has no interest in the love lives of straight people—

“Well,” Jean cuts through his thoughts. “He’s not straight, obviously.”

The vaporizer drops into his lap and he lifts his head to look at her. She’s holding out a piece of her hair, studying the way it catches in the light.

“He’s gay?” he says.

She doesn’t look at him, but she shakes her head. “Bisexual.” She lets out a laugh and adds, “ _Very_ bisexual.”

“What does that even mean?”

Jean hoists herself off the couch and heads towards the kitchen. “I’m getting more wine.”

“Very bisexual,” Erik mutters to the empty room.

Charles is a specter haunting all of his interactions around the pilot program—he even hears second-hand reports of how much the students like the new Biology professor, despite Charles’s song-and-dance at the welcome session about never having held a teaching position before.

The pilot _is_ going well, by all accounts, better than he and Ororo had hoped it would. Their second evening event, a guest reading by a renowned mutant poet, is open to the entire campus, and they pack the auditorium—Erik even notices a few colleagues from his department there, people he’d never pegged as poetry types, let alone mutant poetry types.

A few poems in, he glances down the row towards the center aisle where Charles is seated. He’s looking up at the stage with a rapt expression on his face. Erik wouldn’t have pegged him for a mutant poetry type, either.

But then afterwards at the reception, as he watches the poet lean in close to talk to Charles, and Charles places an unmistakably flirty hand on the man’s arm in response, it all becomes clear.

“Well, I have to admit that I’ve never really been into poetry,” Jean says, coming up close behind him. “But I thought that was wonderful.”

“Mmmm,” Erik says, absently taking a sip of his drink.

“And he’s so handsome,” Jean adds. “Especially those eyes.”

Erik frowns. The poet’s eyes—big, amber, shaped like a cat’s—are admittedly very striking. He supposes the rest of the man’s face is, too. And his shoulders.

“I was mostly interested in the themes of his work,” Erik says.

Jean laughs, and Charles is laughing now, too—clearly the poet has said something hilarious, since Charles is doubling over and tugging on the man’s sleeve in the process.

Erik can hear the phrase _very bisexual_ so clearly that he half suspects that Jean’s projecting it into his head.

But when he looks at her, she’s wearing an extremely innocent expression. “Well,” she says, nudging him in the side with an elbow. “Which themes in particular?”

The final straw comes a few days later, early one morning when Erik is out for a run.

The temperature’s dropped rapidly over the past few weeks, and it feels more like fall every day. This particular morning is crisp and clear, so he ends up running a lot longer than planned—far past his usual route, along a winding wooded trail that loops around and comes out a few blocks from the football field.

He slows his pace as he runs the last couple of blocks. It’s one of the shady side streets on the way into town, the site—hopefully—of his future home ownership. Every house is painted a crisp shade of white, which must be some kind of New England law, and with the leaves beginning to turn, it looks like something off a postcard.

And then, just as he’s passing the nicest house on the block, its bright red door opens and Charles emerges, wheeling down the ramp covering the original stairs and onto the little stone path that leads to the driveway.

They both freeze. Erik stares at him, looking perfectly put together and wearing a tweed blazer of all things, and he’s suddenly acutely aware that he has been running for the past several hours, and probably looks it.

“Good morning,” Charles says, sounding unsure.

“Do you live here?” Erik says. Then, for reasons he can’t articulate, he points at the house and repeats, “ _Here_?”

Charles cranes his neck to look at his own house before looking back at Erik. “Yes?”

“You know I live—”

“Just down the road, yes,” Charles says, and then his eyes widen. “Because Jean told me—I haven’t been spying on you.”

Erik frowns. “But how do you live…” He gestures with one hand at the house. It’s got to be at least three bedrooms, maybe more. It has shutters and flowerbeds. It has a little historical plaque by the door that probably says “built in 1792” or something. He finishes weakly, “…here.”

“I, uh…” Charles shifts in his chair slightly. “I needed someplace to live when I moved here. So I bought it.”

Erik stares at him. “You bought it.”

“It was actually already accessible, which was quite convenient,” Charles says quickly. “The previous owners were an elderly couple who moved to a retirement community. Somewhere warm, I believe.”

Erik tries to process this information as he continues to stare, thinking about how even though he’s five years older than Charles, Charles owns a beautiful and clearly expensive house, and he’s stuck renting an apartment from the biggest prick in the state of Massachusetts.

“Anyway,” Charles says, and then he glances at his watch. “Oh! My apologies, I’ve got to get going—I’ll be late for my doctor’s appointment.”

This snaps Erik out of it, and he takes a step back, even though they’re already fifteen feet apart. “Right,” he says. “Sorry.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Charles says, waving a hand. Another stretch of silence passes, and then he says, “Well, it was nice seeing you this morning.” He pauses and adds, “Uh…neighbor.”

“Right,” Erik says again. “OK then.”

He raises his hand in a sort of awkward half wave, and then he shakes his head and breaks back into a run.

*

As he does every year, Erik drives down to Queens for the High Holidays.

He’s mostly stopped thinking of his parents’ house as his childhood home, but it looks the same as always: very small and very tidy, with six square feet of bricked-off garden carefully tended in front. Someone—probably his mother—has put a sign in the window, a peace symbol overlaid on the queer mutant pride flag. They’ve always been totally supportive, but he suspects it’s probably as much a “fuck you” to their neighbors as it is a sign of solidarity with their son.

He shakes his head and rings the bell to warn them before opening the door with his powers.

“In here!” his father calls from the kitchen, though Erik could have guessed that by the smell.

His father is wearing a magenta apron, his glasses pushed up directly on top of his head, and he’s stirring something in a big soup pot on the stove. He turns towards Erik, wooden spoon still in hand, and wraps his arms around Erik’s shoulders.

His father is just as tall as he always was—a few inches shorter than Erik—but he’s been feeling just a little bit frailer every time they hug, in a way that Erik doesn’t like to think about.

“Where’s Mom?” Erik asks when they pull back, reaching around to dip a finger in the pot.

His father smacks his wrist with the spoon and then returns to stirring. “Either still protesting in front of the Senate Minority Leader’s brownstone or being hauled into central booking.”

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Erik says, sighing. He opens the fridge with his powers and floats a beer over before taking a seat at the kitchen table. “She can’t take a day off for the holidays?”

His father turns to look at him with a frown. “Haven’t you been following the news the past few days?” His voice gets fractionally louder. “The Democrats _say_ they represent the most vulnerable people in this country, but not a single damn one of them has the _spine_ to stand up to—”

“Yeah, yeah, sorry,” Erik cuts in before his father can wind himself up into full rant mode. “I’m sure I agree with whatever you’re saying. I’ve just been working a lot since the semester started.”

“Ah. Of course.” His father makes a derisive noise as he turns back to the pot. “The ivory tower.”

Erik glares at the back of his father’s head. “You know I’m basically working two jobs right now trying to get this program—”

“I know, I know,” his father says, waving him off without turning around. “And I know you’re doing important work, putting together this mutant…thing…”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Interdisciplinary program.”

“Exactly,” his father says with a nod, as though he was the one who actually said it.

He knows that his parents are proud of him, and he knows that they _do_ care about his work, or the general idea of it, anyway. They’ve always been loudly supportive of their gay mutant son—after all, they were protesting for both gay and mutant rights alongside every other cause under the sun long before he was born.

But the mutant stuff has always been a little more complicated. He suspects that even now, decades later, they still hold some guilt about his adolescence—that they couldn’t afford to take him out of public school, where the answer to difficult manifestations like his were the draconian “suppression” methods they’d later have tribunals about, isolation and punishment and drugs so blunt they left most of the kids who were forced to take them sort of hollowed-out zombies.

He was so angry in the years that followed, once he finally gained control of his powers and started to understand the strength of them—and the full scale of what the school had done to him. But he also started to understand something he’d always taken for granted: that his parents were angry, too. They were fueled by a sort of righteousness, the kind of anger that fought for justice; even though Erik had never fully realized it, all his life, they’d been teaching him to do the same.

In another world, he imagines his pent-up rage would have led to violence, probably eventually landed him in jail—but then, in the real world, he’s still been arrested more times than he can count. The first time was a sit-in his mother brought him to when he was sixteen, in the marble-tiled lobby of the headquarters of the largest mutant suppressant manufacturer in the world.

He’ll never forget her triumphant grin as the cop hauled him to his feet; she had just enough time to give him a big thumbs up before she was getting handcuffed, too.

His father turns from the pot again and pointedly looks at his feet on the chair, but instead of commenting, he says, “You could offer to help, you know.”

Erik thinks about mentioning the three-hour drive—closer to four today, since he left too late to avoid rush hour—but he’s aware that they should probably get dinner finished quickly in case one of them has to go to Brooklyn and collect his mother from the police.

He drains the rest of the beer and floats the can to the recycling bin. “Fine,” he says, standing and dusting his hands on his jeans. “Put me to work.”

His father points to a colander full of unpeeled potatoes sitting in the sink and claps him on the back. Erik frowns, trying to figure out if there’s a way to work the peeler without ever touching the potato.

Nobody winds up having to go to Brooklyn: his mother returns an hour later with twin rants about the NYPD and the New York state congressional delegation, which are punctuated by the occasional “It’s an outrage” from his father and his own interjections of “Of fucking course.”

The next afternoon, he’s back in the kitchen—thankfully using a knife this time—when the doorbell rings. The sound of adult greetings is immediately drowned out by the unmistakable screeches of multiple children under the age of seven.

His mother smiles as she dries her hands on a dish towel. “Go and say hello to your cousins.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Can I vote for an adults-only Rosh Hashanah next year?”

She swats him with the towel. “Whatever I did to raise such an awful curmudgeon…”

His aunt and uncle are there, too, looking even frailer than his parents, shuffling around the tiny foyer taking off their jackets and exchanging greetings. His cousin Rebecca’s husband—possibly the most boring man in the world—shakes his hand, while Rebecca herself looks like she’s about to collapse from exhaustion. The children are already gone, though Erik could tell them from personal childhood experience that exploration of this house lasts about ten minutes, max.

By the time everyone is settled in the living room, he’s already had to retrieve gauze and a bandage for one of the children; he’s half tempted to pin the instigator to the radiator by his belt buckle before he strikes again.

He’s finally returned to chopping—and has decided it’s late enough in the day to crack open the wine—when the doorbell rings again. He shakes his head and lets his mother get it.

“Hiding in the kitchen with your knives, I see.”

He drops the knife on the cutting board and spins around. Magda is standing in the doorway, grinning, her curls loose and framing her face like a halo. He looks down at her midsection immediately.

“I’m sorry,” he says. “But this is extremely weird.”

“Normal people say congratulations, you know,” she says, rolling her eyes and placing a hand on her stomach.

“I already congratulated you on the phone. Multiple times.” He crosses the kitchen to give her a careful hug, muttering into her hair, “It’s different to actually see it.”

“Imagine what it’s like to actually be pregnant,” she says, laughing. She pulls back and holds him at arm’s length, looking him up and down. “You look really good.”

“Yeah, yeah,” he says, waving her off as he pulls a chair out for her with his powers.

Non-pregnant Magda would have made some comment about how inane chivalry is, but pregnant Magda is apparently interested in sitting down as quickly as possible. He gets her a glass of water before topping up his wine and taking the seat next to her.

“Where’s your husband?”

“Oh, he was on call and…” She shrugs. “He’s always kind of awkward with this stuff anyway.”

“Should’ve married a nice Jewish boy,” he says, in an imitation that could easily pass for either Magda’s mother or his own.

“I’d say that all the nice Jewish boys I knew wanted to marry boys themselves,” she says, nudging his knee with her own. “But you were never very nice.”

“Excuse me,” he says, holding up his hands in protest. “I never said I wanted to marry _anyone_.”

As they’re laughing, there’s an enormous crash in the next room, followed by a long, loud wail. Over the commotion of voices, Rebecca’s husband shouts, “It’s OK! He’s fine!”

Erik raises an eyebrow and gestures towards the doorway. “You’re actively choosing this?”

The next few hours are a total whirlwind—they say the prayers and eat the meal and only one of the children’s injuries is serious enough that they consider taking him to the emergency room—so Erik doesn’t get Magda alone again until they’ve finally said goodbye to his relatives and only the Maximoffs remain.

Their parents are in the living room, moderately drunk and venturing towards the conversational space of “arguing loudly over extremely hair-splitting details of issues we all agree on,” so Erik grabs a mostly full bottle of wine and drags Magda out to their postage-stamp of a backyard.

“Not gonna lie,” she says, watching him drink straight out of the bottle. “Pregnancy has its downsides.”

He holds it out to her. “You know you can have a little, right? They’ve done…research.”

She rolls her eyes and takes the bottle. “Thanks, I’d never heard that in my decade as a physician or in my six months as a pregnant person.”

Erik snorts and leans back, resting his elbows on the top step. It’s a warm night for September—warmer than it would be in Massachusetts, anyway—and he closes his eyes and listens to the city sounds he misses regularly as he stretches his powers to feel the traffic on Queens Boulevard.

Magda deposits the bottle on the step between them. “So. Tell me about this program of yours.”

He opens one eye and picks up the bottle, taking a very long sip.

She laughs. “Is that an indication of how it’s going?”

He smiles and shakes his head, but he hangs onto the bottle anyway. “It’s going well but…I don’t know, it’s complicated.”

She jerks her head back towards the house. “They’re just getting started. We have time.”

He begins with the basics—the concept, the planning committee, the year of bureaucratic hoops—and then he tells her how it’s all been coming together the past few weeks. But as he talks about his pilot program colleagues, despite his best efforts, he keeps veering back towards Charles.

“OK, can I stop you for a second?” she says. “Because I know you said you hate this guy—”

“I do,” Erik says with a nod, and then he takes another swig from the bottle.

“But it’s just—don’t get mad.” She holds up her hands like a pretend shield. “It sort of seems like you’re obsessed with him.”

Erik frowns. “Like an obsessive hatred.”

She shakes her head. “Come on.”

“Maybe I’m not telling this correctly—”

“Here’s the thing about you,” she cuts in. “Your certainty is one of your best qualities. You commit to something and you’re totally unwilling to back down.” She gestures towards the house. “Your parents are like this, too, you know—probably why they’re still chaining themselves to nuclear power plants in their seventies.”

“What’s your point?”

She rolls her eyes. “My _point_ is this can work against you. Certainty can mean rigidity. You make instant judgements and then you’re totally unwilling to take in new information and—” She lowers her voice like she’s about to tell him a secret. “ _Change your mind_.”

Erik takes a long sip to avoid having to respond to that. It’s not that he doesn’t understand what she’s saying. But usually, when he makes up his mind about something, he’s right.

“Well?” she prompts.

“Petition to change the subject.”

She groans. “You’re so predictable.”

“Tell me all about—” He gestures vaguely at her stomach. “This.”

She barks out a laugh and says, “You really must be desperate to change the subject, huh?”

He shrugs. “If I have to learn about pregnancy, it should probably be from the only woman I’ve ever had sex with.”

She holds up an index finger. “A reminder that we should be grateful we didn’t learn this lesson together twenty years ago.”

They both laugh, and Erik takes another sip from the bottle as he leans back to listen to his oldest friend in the world explain how babies work, only absently wondering how long he needs to wait before asking what are the odds that her kid might be a mutant.

*

They hold the first Mutant Studies symposium in a room at the campus center that’s often used for film showings, with couches and soft chairs and a big screen along the front wall. Ororo had put in an initial order for ten pizzas, and Erik had skeptically asked her how long she’d spent teaching nineteen-year-old boys before doubling the order himself.

Charles is one of the last to arrive: Erik looks up from his extremely mediocre pizza to see him wheeling quickly towards the front, his cheeks flushed pink. He appears to be wearing a different tweed blazer from the other day, which means he unironically owns multiple tweed blazers.

“Everything all right?” Ororo asks as he approaches.

Charles waves a hand. “Fine, fine. I’ve just had a bit of a day.”

“Saved you some pizza,” Jean says, holding out a plate.

Charles lights up as he takes it from her. “With my favorite toppings, thank you.”

Erik narrows his eyes as he looks between the two of them, wondering if a few weeks back, Jean had meant to say that she and Charles weren’t dating _yet_.

Once everyone’s eaten too much pizza, Ororo claps her hands and addresses the room.

“We’re going to keep things relatively informal in these sessions,” she says. “Everyone in this room brings something different to the conversation—different areas of study, of course, but also, different mutations and different experiences of being a mutant.”

She looks over at Erik as she gestures in his direction. “Tonight we’re lifting the title of Professor Lehnsherr’s upper-level seminar, ‘The Mutant Body,’ which I know at least a few of you are taking this semester.”

A few of his students smile and wave—Hannah’s in the front row, and from a couch towards the back, Darwin grins and gives him a thumbs up. Erik hadn’t noticed before, but Darwin has his other arm around the shoulders of a blond boy who looks very familiar. He stares for a second before he realizes: it’s Alex, the kid from Mutant Haus who blasted a hole in one of Porter’s bushes the other day. Standing on his porch watching Porter’s subsequent meltdown had been a true high point of Erik’s week.

“Professor Lehnsherr’s class is about the mutant body as a site of politics,” Ororo continues. “If I taught a class with the same title, it’d probably be about the history of state violence against mutants, amongst other things.” She pauses and smiles. “But if Professor Xavier taught it…”

The students laugh, and so does Charles.

“No theoretical bodies, I’m afraid,” he says, spreading his hands, palm-up. “But I would argue that ‘the mutant body’ is literally my field of expertise.”

He glances at Erik, and there’s something challenging in the quirk of his eyebrow. Erik frowns.

“So that’s what we want to talk about today,” Ororo says. “Those intersections—and those friction points.”

The discussion starts off well enough. They talk about visible and invisible mutations, and the way the terms themselves set problematic boundaries around societal perceptions of mutant life. One student brings up weaponizing mutations and military exploitation, which provokes a very passionate response, especially from the people in the room with potentially destructive powers.

But then, about an hour in, Jean brings up people who have the X-gene but never manifest, and the conversation starts to turn.

“Obviously they aren’t mutants,” Erik says dismissively. “But there is an interesting question—”

“Why aren’t they mutants?”

Erik looks over at Charles, who has both eyebrows raised.

“What do you mean?” Erik says slowly.

“They carry the same mutated gene cluster as you and I,” Charles says. “Their children are as likely to inherit those genes as any of our children would be.”

Erik stares at him. “But if they never manifest, then they never live in the world as a mutant.”

Charles gestures expansively at the room. “The conversation thus far has touched a huge diversity of mutant life. The person who can perk up a plant with their fingertip is not living the same life as the person who can kill another person with their fingertip.”

“OK,” Erik says, folding his arms across his chest. “But they can both do _something_.”

“Some manifestations happen far later than others,” Charles continues. “And these days, we can test for the X-gene in utero, but expressing mutations from birth are still relatively rare. We think of many mutants as mutants long before they can do _something_.”

It’s the imitation of his final word that pushes Erik right up against the edge.

“What, exactly, is the point of your argument here?”

Charles rolls his eyes. “That when you get down to the science of it, mutation is a lot more complicated than your socially constructed boundaries make it out to be.”

“Wait, wait, I know this one,” Erik says mockingly. “This is clearly leading up to some inane—”

“You know,” Ororo cuts in. “Maybe we should just take a minute—”

“‘Underneath all our differences, we’re not that different,’” Erik sneers, talking over her. “‘Mutants and humans are just—’”

“Oh my _God_ ,” Charles interrupts, glaring at him. “Mutants _are_ humans, you nitwit.”

Erik’s rage flares at that. “Yeah? Then why do so many people pit mutants against humans?”

Charles throws up his hands. “Because they’re apparently as ignorant about basic biology as you are!” He leans forward, gripping the armrests of his chair. “For someone who teaches a class called the ‘The Mutant Body,’ you don’t seem to have the first clue about—”

“I’ll tell you what I have the first clue about,” Erik says, raising his voice. “The lived realities of mutants in this world. The suffering and the cruelty. The only people who trot out ‘we’re all mutants, deep down’ are the ones who are _ashamed_ to be mutants, who think if they try to fit in hard enough, it’ll protect them from—”

“ _Gentlemen_ ,” Ororo says sternly. She gestures out towards the students. “Maybe take it down a notch.”

Erik looks out at the crowd. The students are staring, wide-eyed. Hank actually looks frightened.

He sits back in a huff. Charles is still glaring at him, his knuckles white as he grips the armrests.

“Let’s agree that it’s a complicated topic that we’ll continue to explore in the coming weeks,” Ororo says with forced cheer, standing and addressing the room. “But for now, I think we should call it a night. Thank you, everyone.”

The students immediately burst into chatter as they stand to gather their things. Ororo turns and looms over the two of them, her hands on her hips and her eyebrows sky-high.

“What the hell was that?”

Charles glances at him and frowns. “I’m sorry—I got carried away.”

Ororo gestures at Erik. “And what do you have to say for yourself?”

He looks directly at Charles as he says, “I’m only sorry I had to listen to that bullshit.”

“For the love of God.” Charles pinches the bridge of his nose. “Do you even listen to yourself?”

Erik stands abruptly, lifting up his bag with his powers and slinging it over his shoulder. “I do,” he says. “And it’s a hell of a lot better than listening to you.”

He doesn’t give Charles the chance to respond, marching past the remaining students and out through the back exit of the campus center.

He walks home in a cloud of rage, muttering under his breath.

“ _Nitwit_ ,” he spits out onto the deserted street. “I’ll show you who’s a fucking nitwit.”

He stops at the football field and glances around to make sure the streets are as empty as always, and then he uses his powers to bend one of the goalposts, pushing until it touches the grass, then pulling it upright again. Twisting all that metal is deeply satisfying, and he stands there for ten minutes, bending and unbending, as his fury drops to a low, simmering anger.

He’s been complaining about Charles Xavier for weeks, and in return, his colleagues have spouted endless “oh he’s so nice, if you’d only give him a chance” nonsense. Even Magda—who’s never even met the guy—had hinted that Erik might have been too quick to judge.

If anything good came out of tonight, he thinks as he flings his apartment door open with his powers, it’s that they finally saw what he’s been complaining about.

But the next morning, he wakes up to an email from Moira with the subject line: “Important.” He skims it, taking in “last night’s altercation” and “understandably concerned” and, most critically, the classic Moira not-a-request-but-an-order, “Please stop by my office this morning. Nine a.m.”

He knocks on her open office door just before nine. She looks up and gives him a weary look as she removes her reading glasses.

“Good morning, Erik.”

“Always nice to start the day getting called into the principal’s office,” he says, crossing to sit in the chair in front of her desk. The second one has been removed, which means—

“Yes,” she confirms as he spins around to see Charles wheeling through the doorway. “You both got called into the principal’s office.”

“Good morning,” Charles says, nodding to each of them. “Moira, Erik.”

He pulls up next to Erik and glances at him. This close, Erik can see that aside from the dusting of freckles along his cheekbones, he has two prominent ones on the bridge of his nose.

“So, gentlemen,” Moira says, folding her hands on her desk. “I heard all the details about your…debate last night.”

“It was Jean, wasn’t it?” Erik says.

Moira gives him a look. “It was Ororo, actually.”

Erik sits back in his seat with a huff, feeling betrayed.

“Regardless,” Moria continues. “You should just be glad I haven’t heard that any of the students complained. Because your behavior last night was wildly unprofessional.”

“If I may,” Charles says. “I’d like to apologize again for my conduct. I’d had a very long day—which is no excuse, but still.” He looks over at Erik. “I shouldn’t have engaged.”

“Right,” Erik says. “So I’m the bad guy here, huh?”

Moira gives him a deeply unimpressed look. “I think we can all agree that you’ve had some sort of bizarre issue with Charles from the start.”

He opens his mouth to interrupt, but she holds up a hand.

“But,” she continues. “By all accounts, you were both at fault last night. And that kind of behavior can’t continue. Not amongst the faculty and _certainly_ not in front of the students.”

“Of course not,” Charles says quickly.

Moira turns to face Erik. “I’m going to need you to at least pretend you’re not going to pick any more fights.” She gestures to Charles and adds, “And feel free to tell Charles you’re sorry in return.”

Erik looks at Charles, who’s watching him carefully.

“Fine,” he says. “I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.”

Moira sits back in her seat. “Short and sweet and likely all I’m going to get out of you.” She waves a hand toward the door. “We’re done. Thank you both for stopping by.”

Out in the hall, Charles clears his throat and then says, “Look, I really am sorry.” The corners of his lips quirk up and he adds, “Especially about calling you a nitwit.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “Are you trying to get me to apologize again?”

“No,” Charles says with a frustrated gesture. “Christ, I’m just trying to be nice.”

“Oh,” Erik says. “Well…thanks.”

Charles shakes his head. “You probably won’t believe it, but I don’t think you’re a nitwit at all, actually—I’ve been reading some of your work.” He pauses and looks to the side for a moment before looking back at him. His eyes are so remarkably blue. “We don’t agree politically—not even remotely—but I think that a lot of your work is quite brilliant.”

Erik feels himself flush at that, though why he’s so pleased to hear praise from someone he ostensibly hates is beyond him.

He doesn’t know what to say in response—he hasn’t even bothered to Google Charles yet, let alone read any of his work.

He settles for an extremely awkward, “Uh…thank you.”

A beat passes, and then Charles says, “Well, I’ll see you soon, I’m sure.”

They linger in the hallway for a moment more, and when it becomes clear that Erik isn’t going to say anything in response, Charles shrugs and turns to wheel towards the elevator at the end of the hallway.

Erik watches his retreating form, the words “quite brilliant” echoing through his head.

*

The days are getting shorter and colder, and it’s properly fall now—every morning when Erik goes out for a run, there’s a fine dusting of frost on the fields. He’s been taking longer routes recently, which usually leave him looping past Charles’s house in the final stretch, but he doesn’t see Charles outside again, even on the mornings he’s running later than usual.

Moira must have told the rest of the group about their temporary truce, because neither Jean nor Ororo bring it up when they talk to him, and the next time they all meet, no one mentions it—not even Logan, who was probably dying to squeeze out some sort of joke at Erik’s expense.

Instead, they discuss the final details for their next guest speaker, a big-deal mutant psychologist that most of them are excited to meet, and then Ororo mentions that Moira would like at least a few members of the group to attend the Homecoming weekend reception for mutant alumni—which Erik is dismayed to realize is this coming Saturday.

“No can do,” Logan says, looking extremely satisfied as he leans back and folds his hands behind his head. “I’m taking some students to the final weekend of that mutant sculpture installation in Pittsfield.”

“And I’m at a conference,” Jean says with a frown. “Shoot, I forgot all about Homecoming.”

Erik tries desperately to think of an excuse. Why did he have to visit his parents so recently?

“Well, I’m free,” Charles says with a shrug, glancing at Erik.

Ororo looks at him, too, and after a moment, he sighs and says, “So am I.”

Even though he suspects that his fight with Charles has been a popular topic of conversation amongst the students, he isn’t surprised that none of them mention it in his presence—he already has a reputation for being a hard-ass, and he can’t imagine that any of them want to provoke his ire even further.

They did seem to take a lot from the discussion, though—a couple of students expand on their arguments during the next session of the actual “Mutant Body” seminar, and Darwin stops by his office hours to discuss a few concepts from the evening as he works through his thesis outline.

But the one student from the program Erik is surprised to see in his doorway is Hank, clutching his bag to his chest and looking like he’s about to turn around and bolt at any minute.

After a moment, he says, “Can I help you, Hank?”

“I’m sorry to bother you,” Hank says quickly.

“You’re not,” Erik says, giving him a “come in” gesture and opening the door a bit wider with his powers. “That’s what office hours are for.”

Hank comes into his office and sits down carefully, his timid posture totally at odds with his sheer size—not to mention the overwhelming amount of blue fur. Erik tries to keep his expression neutral, even somewhat open; he may be a hard-ass in the classroom, but he can usually tell when mutant students are stopping by for reasons that aren’t strictly academic.

“I’m here about the midterm paper,” Hank says. “For Intro to Mutant Politics.”

Erik raises his eyebrows. Maybe he’s not so good at reading signals from mutant students after all.

“What about it in particular?” he says. “Do you need an extension?”

“No, no,” Hank says quickly. “It’s just…” He looks away with a sigh. “I’m not sure I belong in the Mutant Studies program.”

“So this isn’t about the midterm?” Erik says, feeling only a little triumphant that he read this one correctly.

Hank looks back up at him. “It’s just…when it’s only science, it’s easier.”

“What is?”

“Being a mutant,” Hank says. “Or, I don’t know, thinking about being a mutant.”

“OK…” Erik says slowly.

“But my friends made me sign up for this program,” Hank continues, talking faster and faster. “And then Professor Xavier told me to take your class and I spend every day being blue and furry and everyone in the world knows I’m a mutant but now I’m always thinking about being a mutant and the politics of mutanthood and—” He stops and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry.”

“No,” Erik says quickly. “Don’t apologize.”

“I know how to think about science, but I don’t know the right way to think about any of this stuff,” he continues. “And Professor Xavier said—”

“You talked to Professor Xavier about this?”

Hank nods. “He gave me some advice, but mostly, he said I should talk to you.”

Erik frowns. “Did he say why?”

Hank shrugs and says, “Because you’re good at living your politics.” His nose wrinkles as he adds, “He didn’t really expand on that, but I think I understand what he meant.”

Erik sits back in his chair and tries to absorb this information. He lifts a nearby pen with his powers and sets it spinning it in a slow circle. Hank watches, wide-eyed.

“OK,” he says eventually, bringing the pen to a halt. “I guess my first piece of advice is that you don’t have to live your politics yet, if you’re still figuring out what your politics are.”

“Can I choose no politics?” Hank says hopefully.

“I guess you can,” Erik says. “Or you can say as much, anyway. But you said it yourself—everyone in the world knows you’re a mutant. So in a way, that choice is out of your hands.”

Hank looks at the ground. “Yeah.”

“Which is why you probably want to wish it away,” Erik continues. “I get it, I really do.” He floats the pen back to the desk. “For now, I’d say, take this class and stay in this program and pay attention to how other mutants tackle these questions. You have plenty of time to figure out how you want to tackle them yourself.”

“Is that what you did when you were younger?” Hank asks. “Take your time?”

Erik tries not to make a face. “Not so much. But—” He waves his hand vaguely. “Do as I say and all that.”

Hank nods, though he still looks a little confused. Erik eventually sends him on his way, pretty sure that he gave half-coherent advice—Hank no longer seemed like he was on the brink of dropping the program, anyway.

He thinks of his college self, furious with everyone and everything, extremely loud and utterly certain of his own perspective. He got arrested at least once a month and he was always on the brink of expulsion and he regularly shouted down his professors in a way that he’d never stand for with his own students. The world desperately needed to change, and it wasn’t changing quickly enough—and Erik made certain that everyone he encountered was aware of that fact.

Nearly two decades later, some things have gotten better but plenty of things have gotten worse. He’s just as angry as ever—but he’s had to make all sorts of sacrifices for this job. Sometimes when he talks to his parents—especially when they’re heading off to do something risky—he feels like a sellout. Magda is the only one who truly knows how much it bothers him, and she’s the one who’s reminded him over the years: direct action isn’t the only way to change the world.

Radical mutant indoctrination on our college campuses, he thinks with a laugh. That or gently telling self-hating blue furry mutants to be patient with themselves as they learn politics 101.

On Saturday, Erik resolutely ignores the football game happening two blocks from his apartment—not to mention the corresponding party that Mutant Haus manages to stretch from the dorm to the field—as he tries to catch up on edits for the paper he’s co-authoring.

Late in the afternoon, he puts on a suit and heads across campus to Alumni House. The mutant alumni reception is in the main room, and it’s already in full swing when he arrives, with a jazz quartet in the corner and uniformed waiters carrying trays of drinks. He passes a table of food and shudders at the sight of the omnipresent cookies, but the promise of an open bar more than makes up for it.

He doesn’t see Ororo anywhere, but he quickly spots the back of Charles’s head, nodding enthusiastically as a purple-skinned man tells him a very animated story. Erik snags a glass of wine from a waiter and slides up next to them.

“Erik!” Charles looks genuinely happy to see him. “Joe, this is Erik Lehnsherr, the mastermind behind the program I was telling you about. Erik, this is—”

“Joe Fitzgerald,” the man says, extending a hand. “Class of ’98.” He smiles and adds, “I’m so jealous of the current students—there were barely any classes about mutants when I was here, let alone a whole program.”

Erik shakes his hand and says, “Well, we’re hoping to make it permanent.”

They make small talk for a few minutes—he’s surprised to find he genuinely doesn’t mind, as Joe tells them about his mutant law practice—before Joe spots an old classmate and politely excuses himself.

“Well, here we are,” Charles says, taking a large sip of wine. After a pause, he nods at Erik and adds, “You look great, by the way.”

Erik looks down at his suit, which he’d forgotten he was wearing, and then actually looks at Charles properly for the first time and sees that he’s wearing a suit, too—black and slim fit, falling perfectly across the broad expanse of his shoulders. He looks…extremely good.

“Uh,” he says articulately. “Ditto.”

Charles smiles. “I don’t think Ororo’s coming, by the way.”

Erik looks around quickly, as if he’d be able to spot her hiding in the corner. “Why? Did she say something?”

Charles looks slightly chagrined. “I promise I wasn’t eavesdropping, but…”

Erik gives him a skeptical look.

He holds up his hands in surrender. “When she was asking if we were free, she was projecting a strong sense of, ‘Why don’t I just leave them to it?’”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” Erik says. “We’re not in some sort of movie.”

Charles laughs. “If we were in a movie, I think they’d lock us in a storage closet.”

Erik wiggles his fingers and then tugs lightly at Charles’s tie clip with his powers. “You know that one won’t work on me.”

They both laugh, and as Erik takes a sip of wine, he realizes that they’ve been talking for several minutes and neither of them has fired off a single insult. Stranger yet, they’ve spent most of the time laughing.

“It’s nice, you know,” Charles says. “Getting to chat for a bit. Without—” He waves a hand vaguely in the air. “I don’t know, having to conduct ideological warfare.”

He wonders if Charles plucked the thoughts out of his head—or if he’s plucking thoughts out of his head right now—but then he does his best to push all that aside. He promised not to pick a fight, and he’s not going to break that promise over something as stupid as anti-telepathic bias.

Instead, he grins and says, “Don’t get too comfortable—I still think you’re wrong about literally everything.”

“Literally everything!” Charles repeats with a laugh. “That sounds like a challenge to me.”

Erik gestures at Charles’s near-empty wineglass and waves his own, saying, “Let me get us more to drink first. You can make a list of the terrible things you believe while I’m gone.”

*

Jean comes over for dinner the following weekend, armed with a bottle of good bourbon and approximately one thousand questions.

He tries not to be too evasive, but the truth is, there’s not that much to tell. He spent the entire length of the reception talking to Charles without starting any fights—or even getting into any real disagreements, for that matter—all the while thinking that Charles looked…extremely good. He leaves that last part out, though he’s concerned that Jean’s smirk means she’s lifting it from his mind.

“So you’re friends now?” she asks.

He turns from the skillet, still manipulating the spatula with his powers, to see her giving him an innocent look. He narrows his eyes.

“What’s your agenda here?”

She holds up her hands. “No agenda.” She smiles. “I just think you two have more in common than you think.”

“Ha.” He shakes his head and turns back to the skillet to lower the heat. “Now that’s just wishful thinking.”

By the time they’ve finished dinner, they’ve put a serious dent in the bourbon; if pressed, Erik would admit to being mildly drunk. Jean’s in a similar state—if anything, she’s a bit farther gone.

“The thing about telepathy,” she’s saying as Erik pours them each another generous measure. “Is sometimes you think you’re picking up on the whole picture, but you’re actually only picking up on part of the picture.”

Erik frowns. “How is that different from everyone else?”

“It’s different,” Jean says earnestly. “I—”

She’s interrupted by a loud crashing noise and then what sounds like an entire crowd whooping. Erik closes his eyes and rests his head against the back of the couch.

“What was that?” she says.

“My young neighbors,” he says wearily. “Just being their best mutant selves.”

He hears her footsteps across the hardwood floor, and then she calls out from across the room, “They’re wearing costumes!”

He opens his eyes. “Wait, is it Halloween?”

They stare at each other for a moment and then they both burst out laughing.

“If that’s not a sure sign of our advancing age…” Jean says, clutching the window frame.

Erik knocks back the rest of his drink and hauls himself to his feet to join her. Mutant Haus is definitely throwing a party, and the people out on the back lawn are definitely wearing Halloween costumes. It’s hard to pick up details at this distance, but he can see a few well-made ones and a lot of half-assed ones and _a lot_ of extremely skimpy ones.

And then there’s a flash of red light, and a huge cheer goes up again.

“Was that…” Jean wrinkles her nose and leans closer to the glass. “I’m not sure they should be messing with their powers when they’ve probably had a lot to…” She waves her hand in the air.

Erik claps her on the back. “Pot, meet kettle.” He gently steers her away from the window and back to the couch. “It’s best to leave them to it. If you eventually want to look them in the eye in class, anyway.”

“Is that what you did in college?” she says with a sly smile as they settle back on the couch. “Get drunk and…” She wiggles her fingers in imitation of Erik. “Bend metal?”

Erik snorts. “I usually saved my powers for minor acts of domestic terrorism.”

The smile slips from Jean’s face. “Seriously?”

He sits up a little straighter and says, “Uh…kind of?”

“I know you have some radical views…” Jean trails off, looking a little unsure. “But I didn’t—”

She breaks off at the sound of screams and shouts from outside, and they both rush back to the window. Students are pouring out of Mutant Haus and heading across the driveway towards Porter’s house—because Porter’s lawn is on fire.

“Holy shit,” he says. “This is incredible.”

“Erik!” Jean hisses, smacking him in the arm. “We need to call the fire department.”

“You don’t understand—” he calls out as she heads towards the kitchen to retrieve her phone.

They put on their jackets and go outside to join the crowd of students watching as the first fire truck arrives. Porter is on his front porch, wearing the infamous bathrobe and throwing a fit, while his wife glares at the entire scene from the doorway.

Jean leads him towards the front of the crowd, coming to a stop right next to Darwin and Alex, both of whom are in costumes that Erik can’t immediately identify, and neither of whom are wearing a shirt. Darwin must be doing something with his mutation to stave off the cold, but Alex is shivering, even as Darwin has his arm around him.

“Whoa,” Darwin says, catching sight of them. “What are you guys doing here?”

“I have the misfortune of living—” Erik points to his apartment. “—there.”

Darwin’s eyebrows shoot up. “I’m sorry, man.”

They both glance at Jean, but neither of them ask why she was also in Erik’s apartment at ten o’clock on a Friday, which is just fantastic, because now people are going to speculate that _they’re_ the ones who are dating.

“What happened, exactly?” Jean says, pulling her jacket tighter.

“It was me,” Alex says. Erik remembers when he blasted a hole in the bushes—he’d mostly seemed proud then. Now, he looks extremely worried.

“He shoots lasers out of his chest,” Darwin clarifies. “And…” He tips his head toward the blaze.

Erik wants to tell him the sight of Porter’s lawn on fire is one of the most beautiful things he’s ever seen, but he’s absolutely certain that will make its way back to his department colleagues.

Instead he says, “I’m sure it was an accident.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Alex says. “I got a warning for the last one. This time…”

Jean frowns. “But it _was_ an accident, right? It’s probation for a second infraction.”

They all look back at Porter, waving his arms in the air and shouting something about locking up mutants who can’t control their powers, and suddenly, Erik is extremely worried, too.

It’s not until a week later, at the next pilot group meeting, that Erik learns that they were right to worry.

“Very bad news,” Ororo says, holding up her phone. “One of the students from the pilot has been expelled. Alex Summers—apparently there was some kind of incident on Halloween?”

“Expelled?” Jean says, looking shocked.

“An _incident_ ,” Erik says at the same time. “What absolute bullshit.”

Ororo glances back and forth between the two of them. “You know what happened?”

They quickly recount the events of the evening, and by the end of it, everyone looks unhappy, even Charles.

“You’re right,” Logan says. “That is absolute bullshit.”

“Students do dumb stuff at parties all the time,” Ororo says, shaking her head. “Even suspension would be way too extreme. Expulsion should be reserved for serious—and intentional—harm.”

“Porter,” Charles says, his expression inscrutable. “You’ve mentioned him before.”

Erik rolls his eyes. “My department head and landlord—and an unmitigated douchebag.” He folds his arms over his chest and adds, “He’s a mutantphobe, too.”

Charles cocks his head. “What has he said?”

“Oh, it’s just constant little things,” Erik says. “You know when you can just tell?”

Charles looks at him for a moment, and then he nods.

“What recourse does Alex have?” Jean asks. “Can we intervene in any way?”

Ororo glances down at her phone to look at the email again. “Apparently we’re welcome to write strongly-worded letters.”

Erik snorts, and Jean looks deflated.

“Ah,” Ororo continues. “There _will_ be an appeals process in a few weeks.” She holds up her phone. “I’ll forward you the details.”

He spends the rest of the meeting half listening, half thinking furious thoughts about Porter. As long as Erik’s been his tenant, Porter’s been looking for excuses to go after the residents of Mutant Haus. He spends a few minutes fantasizing about melting all the door handles in the Porters’ house—he’d do it in a heartbeat if there were any other mutants on campus who had even remotely similar powers, for plausible deniability.

In his mind, he turns “Just you fucking wait until I have tenure” into a little jingle, and he puts it on loop.

At the end of the meeting, they’re gathering their things when Charles says to him, “Are you heading home now?”

Erik feels the time on his watch and says, “Yeah. Why?”

Charles hesitates for a moment, and then he says, “We live in the same direction. We could…”

“OK,” Erik says quickly, and then adds, “I mean, sure, that makes sense.”

Jean gives him a wide-eyed look and raises both eyebrows dramatically, but he turns his back to her before she can comment.

He follows Charles to the elevator and then out the rear exit of the building. It’s the first week with the clocks back, so it’s already dark out, even though it’s barely past five.

“Sorry,” Charles says, gesturing to the path that leads to the center of campus. “I may take a more circuitous route than you normally do…”

“That’s fine,” Erik says, pulling his scarf a bit tighter and zipping up his jacket with his powers.

“I feel just awful about Alex,” Charles says as he wheels along the path into the main quad. “He’s in my intro class—he seems like a nice boy.”

“Fucking Porter,” Erik spits out. “He’s such a piece of shit. Being his tenant is bad enough—you should see him in department meetings.”

Charles chuckles and says, “Oh, I can imagine.” He looks up and gives Erik a knowing smile. “Was that what the little tune you were singing was about?”

Erik’s eyes widen in panic. “Was I singing out loud?”

Charles smirks. “No, but to half the people at the table, you may as well have been.”

He flushes at that, but he tries to cover his embarrassment by saying, “Yeah, well, it’s true.”

“There are a couple of…unpleasant people in the Biology department,” Charles says carefully. “But I suppose no department is without its malcontents.”

“Yeah, pretty sure I’ve met a few of them,” Erik says, and Charles laughs.

“Is this the part where I bastardize Tolstoy?” he says. “Every unhappy department is unhappy in its own way?”

Erik snorts. “I’d say every department that doesn’t have its own version of Porter has dodged a fucking bullet.”

As they wind around the English building and down the long path that leads to the gym, Erik can’t help but think about how easy it is to talk to Charles when they aren’t fighting. He supposes it’s pretty easy to talk to him while they’re fighting, too, but that’s probably not a good thing.

They’re about a block from Charles’s house when Charles asks out of nowhere, “Do you usually leave town for Thanksgiving?”

Erik runs through the dates in his head and realizes Thanksgiving is somehow just two weeks away. Wasn’t it just Rosh Hashanah a few weeks ago?

“Yeah,” he says. “My parents live in Queens. I usually drive down for the long weekend.”

“Oh, my sister’s in the city, too,” Charles says. “Some terribly trendy part of Brooklyn.”

“You’re going to spend the holiday with her?”

Charles makes a face. “The trouble is, if I go down there, I’ll be within striking distance of my mother—I’ll have no excuse.”

“Ah,” Erik says. He can’t really imagine a world in which he wanted to avoid his family around holidays, but something in Charles’s tone tells him it’s not his place to pry.

“We’ll see,” Charles says. “I have at least a week to pretend I’m weighing my options.”

Charles comes to a stop and then gestures. Erik looks up at his perfect house—another thing he desperately wants to ask about.

“Thanks for walking me home,” Charles says. There’s something a little teasing in his tone, and if Erik didn’t know any better, he’d say there was something a little flirtatious in there as well.

He shrugs. “It was on my way.”

Charles looks up at him for a moment, his face half in shadow, half illuminated by the streetlights.

“Well,” he says. “Have a good evening.”

Erik feels like he should say something else, but he isn’t sure what. He settles for, “You, too.”

Charles smiles and then pivots to wheel along the path and up the ramp. Erik can feel his keys, and the lock on the front door. Charles pauses with the key in the lock, turning and giving Erik a little wave.

Erik raises a hand in response, and then watches him roll into the house and shut the bright red door behind him.

*

When he steps into the coffee shop, Erik immediately frowns. The entire place is decked out in garlands and bows, with a big tree in the corner and an extremely jazzy rendition of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” coming in over the speakers.

“It’s November 15th!” he says loudly, addressing the entire coffee shop. Several people turn to look at him before immediately going back to their laptops.

At the counter, he gestures to the jar of candy canes next to the register. “For fuck’s sake—can’t you people spare us until after Thanksgiving?”

The barista gives him a blank look from under his Santa hat. “What can I get you, sir?”

After he collects his coffee, Erik glances around the room, lingering on the communal table for a moment before spotting a free table in the back corner—next to the Christmas tree. He sighs.

He’s already sent his strongly-worded letter—he tried to restrain himself, but his words were admittedly pretty strong—and this afternoon, the first email in his inbox is about Alex’s appeals process. They’ve set a date for the hearing with the disciplinary committee—December 1st—and faculty are apparently welcome to attend.

He has thirty-five other unread emails, including half a dozen in his personal filter. One of them is from Magda and has an attachment—a photo of her standing in her living room in scrubs and white lab coat, covering her face with her hands and looking significantly more pregnant than when he saw her in September.

“Just a preview of what you’ll see next week,” she wrote in the body of the email. He sends back, “I expect you to wear your lab coat to dinner, then.”

He’s got another email from his mother about the things he’s responsible for cooking on Thanksgiving, which he barely skims before replying, “Yes, that sounds good.”

He navigates back over to his work filter and glances through the unread emails. Most of them are tedious, but towards the bottom, there’s one from Charles. He expects it to be something for the whole group, but when he clicks on it, he’s surprised to see that it’s only addressed to him.

It’s a link to an op-ed in the _Times_ , with the note, “My sister sent me this—I think you two would get along,” followed by the winking emoji.

When he clicks through, he scans the headline and the byline, raising his eyebrows in surprise. The author is a radical mutant activist who wrote a great trade book on the history of mutants and policing a few years back, and the piece appears to be an argument in favor of mutant separatism.

He’s surprised the _Times_ ran this, but he’s even more surprised that Charles sent it to him with such a friendly note—no snide comments and not even a hint of critique, even though Charles probably disagrees with something in every single sentence.

He reads the piece properly—it’s a pretty cogent introduction to the arguments around separatism for a general audience—and then he writes back, “If your sister agrees with this, then we’d definitely get along—I’d like to meet her sometime.” He pauses, trying to figure out if he should use an emoji of some kind in return. Instead, he finishes with a very bland, “Thanks for sending.”

He stares at the last sentence for a moment and then slowly deletes it, letter by letter. There has to be something more personal he can write.

But five minutes and one entire jazz-trio rendition of “Jingle Bell Rock” later, he still hasn’t come up with anything better to say, so he sighs and types “Thanks for sending” once more.

He checks his email frequently over the next day or so, but Charles doesn’t write back. He’s not sure why he would, really—it’s not like Erik offered anything resembling a conversational opening. He could’ve asked to hear more about Charles’s apparently very smart and sensible sister; instead, he only “thanked him for sending.”

They do see each other the following evening, though, at the next Mutant Studies symposium. Ororo followed his lead and ordered an appropriately massive quantity of pizza, but as Erik puts a few limp slices on a paper plate, he makes a note to propose some other kind of food next time, or at the very least, to find a better pizza place.

The general topic this evening is meant to be mutant education, one he and Ororo decided on long before he ever squabbled with a stranger in a coffee shop over mutants and schools.

While they’re eating their pizza, he glances over at Charles and says, “So should we promise not to get into a public brawl over this one?”

Charles looks up at him in surprise, but after a beat, he gives Erik one of his smug little smiles and says, “No brawling, sure—but that doesn’t mean I’m going to go easy on you.”

There’s something in the way he says it that makes Erik sit up a little straighter. He tries to match Charles’s expression as he says, “Wouldn’t dream of it.”

They’re just about to get started when Hank tentatively approaches the front of the room, holding a small stack of cards.

Charles gives him a warm smile. “How are you doing, Hank?”

Hank glances at Erik for some reason and then looks back at Charles. “Other than all the stuff with Alex…”

Erik frowns and surveys the crowd. The Mutant Haus contingent is, as usual, sitting in the back, but it looks smaller than normal—obviously Alex wouldn’t be here, but Darwin seems to be absent, too.

“Of course,” Charles says, nodding sympathetically. He gestures over at the other three faculty members. “I believe we’re all going to attend the appeals hearing in December.”

“Professor Lehnsherr as well?” Hank says, looking at him with a strangely hopeful expression.

He’d like to say that yes, he’ll be there, because he plans to spend the hearing glaring at Porter and wishing his mutation was to make peoples’ heads explode.

Instead, he nods and says, “Definitely.”

Hank nods in return, and then he seems to remember the cards in his hands, and he thrusts them in Charles’s direction. “They put me in charge of delivering these to you.”

Charles takes the cards and peers at the top one, looking confused, before handing it to Erik.

Erik glances at it quickly—it’s covered in little glittery snowflakes, and the words MUTANT MINGLE are written across the top in silver marker. He grins and says, “Thank you, Hank.”

“It’s just…” Hank looks down at his feet. “This program has been…really good so far.”

Before either of them can respond, he’s turned and hurried back towards his seat, where his housemates crowd around him, laughing and clapping him on the back.

“I’m confused,” Charles says, holding up the card. “Mutant Mingle? It sounds like a dating site.”

Erik laughs. “Mutant Haus throws a holiday party for their favorite professors every year,” he explains. He taps the card with a finger and adds, “Looks like we all made the cut.”

Charles smiles. “Well, that’s quite nice.” He pauses and then says, “I take it you’re going?”

“Oh yeah,” Erik says. “They somehow manage to buy better booze than the provost—and unlike the administration, they don’t have to invite every member of the faculty.”

“I’m sold,” Charles says with a laugh, passing the remainder of the cards over to Jean.

A few minutes later, Ororo kicks off the conversation, throwing out a whole host of topics to see what the students gravitate towards—mutant-only schooling, equitable access to training, the way mutant history and current events are taught in secondary schools. The integration conversation is always a hot-button issue when it comes up in Erik’s intro classes, especially when he gets a wider mix of educational backgrounds.

None of these students are old enough to have had any experiences like his own adolescence—by the time they started school, laws banning forced suppressant use in educational settings had been on the books in every state for years.

So of course, everyone wants to talk about suppressants first.

“Look,” one student says. “I get why what happened in the twentieth century was bad.”

Erik calls up every ounce of self-control to keep from outwardly reacting to the phrase “the twentieth century.”

“But the laws are so restrictive now,” the student continues. “I spent a year melting my pencils and sometimes, my desks, too. I only figured out how to stop when my parents got me some lessons and…” He shrugs. “I don’t know, I guess I would’ve liked to avoid all that.”

Erik opens his mouth, but after a moment, he shuts it again.

He looks over at Charles, who’s watching him carefully. He doesn’t need to be a mind-reader to know that they’re both having uncomfortable flashbacks to the first time they met.

Charles doesn’t look like he’s winding up for a fight, though. The teasing challenge of a few minutes ago has totally vanished.

“I think,” Charles says slowly, his eyes still resting on Erik for a moment before he looks back at the student. “That though the 1990s might _seem_ like the ancient past, what happened in our schools then is barely history. We’re still untangling the consequences of it. We’re still _living_ with the consequences of it.”

For a moment, Erik feels like he can’t breathe. Charles glances at him, and then there’s the lightest feeling of pressure at the surface of his mind.

If he’d never had any telepathic friends before, he might have panicked, or immediately locked down his thoughts. Instead, he nods and signals that Charles can come in.

There are no projected sentences, just a low, simmering warmth and a quick sensation of apology, followed by the sense of a question: whether Erik wants this conversation to continue. In one of those strange telepathic moments he could never visualize and can barely even describe with words, he can feel Charles gently handing him the reins—but only if he wants to take them.

He looks back out at the students. The questioner now looks more impatient than anything—probably because they’ve clearly been communicating telepathically while everyone sat there waiting.

Erik takes a deep breath. “Professor Xavier’s right.”

He glances at Charles, who gives him a small smile.

“I know it probably _does_ seem like ancient history to all of you,” he continues, and then to lighten the mood, he says, “Wait, were any of you even _born_ in the twentieth century?”

They all laugh, and Erik laughs a little, too.

“Seriously though,” he says. “A lot of the time, people who lived through it don’t want to talk about this stuff. Which is totally understandable. But…” He gestures, from himself to the students. “That makes it hard to pass communal memory from generation to generation.”

He thinks for a moment about his conversation with Magda, and the idea that sometimes, you stick to your guns because it’s the first thing you decided on—but not necessarily the right thing. He thinks about how Charles could have come into this conversation swinging, armed with every statistic in the world about modern pharmaceuticals. Instead, he gently deferred to Erik.

“I don’t talk about this much,” he continues. “But I had some experience with the stuff we’re talking about when I manifested.”

The entire crowd seems to lean forward slightly.

“Really?” the original questioner says.

“Really,” Erik says with a nod. “But maybe I should talk about it now…”

He doesn’t look back at Charles, but as he starts to tell the story, he can still feel Charles in his mind: the lightest touch, just a reassurance that he’s still there.

*

The afternoon before Thanksgiving, Erik is finally about to get on the road when he realizes he left the final edits for his paper in his office.

He spends most of the walk to and from campus annoyed with himself—he’d wanted to head out by three, but somehow, there was always one last thing on his to-do list—and then he walks past Charles’s house and stops short.

The driver’s side door of Charles’s car is open, and inside it, someone is cursing loudly.

“Charles?” he says, walking up the driveway.

Charles pops his head out. “Oh, Erik!” he says with a relieved smile. “Perhaps the one person in the world who can help me right now—my car won’t start.”

Erik gives him a skeptical look. “The one person in the world who could help you would be an actual mechanic.”

Charles waves him off. “But you can…you know.” He wiggles his fingers.

Erik shrugs. “I can try?”

Charles presses the ignition, and the car sputters to life for about two seconds before falling silent again. Erik concentrates and tries to trace the metalwork and the circuitry up through the hood of the car.

“Can you do it again?” he says.

They repeat the process a few times before Erik says, “I think it’s something to do with your battery, but don’t quote me on that.” He puts his hands on his hips. “My official diagnosis: your car is broken.”

“Fuck,” Charles mutters, gently resting his head against the steering wheel. “What am I supposed to do now?”

“Where were you trying to go?”

“Brooklyn,” Charles says, his words half-muffled by the steering wheel. “To stay with my sister.”

“You know…” Erik rubs the back of his neck. “I’m leaving for the city in, like, ten minutes.”

Charles looks up at him, his eyes wide. “Oh no,” he says quickly. “I wouldn’t want to impose.”

For a split second, Erik considers agreeing with him—he’s not sure he’s prepared to spend three hours in such close proximity—but then he feels like an asshole for even considering it.

“I’m literally driving to the place you need to go,” he says, waving a hand dismissively. “I’ll swing back here in fifteen minutes to pick you up.”

Half an hour later, they’re heading towards the highway with Charles’s garment bag laid out across the backseat and Charles’s wheelchair neatly folded in the trunk. Charles himself is about a foot away from him, carrying on a mostly one-sided conversation about genomics, and every time Erik glances over at him, he stares at his lips for approximately one millisecond too long.

They pass a sign that reads “NEW YORK CITY: 160” and Erik has to remind himself once more that this was his idea.

In truth, it’s not that bad—he likes talking to Charles, and if Charles is happy to do most of the talking, he doesn’t really mind that, either.

But since the symposium a week ago, most of his thoughts about Charles have been…confusing. Even before that evening, they hadn’t been fighting much anymore, real or pretend. And that absence leaves him focusing on all the things he was aggressively ignoring every time nonsense poured out of Charles’s mouth for the past few months.

Like his mouth. And his eyes. And his shoulders. His entire upper body, really.

He remembers too late that he’s still sitting a foot away from a telepath, and he slams his mind shut.

Charles winces and cuts off mid-sentence. He looks at Erik curiously. “Is everything…all right?”

Erik looks resolutely back at the road. “Were you reading my mind?”

“No,” Charles says, sounding annoyed. “But you can hear a door slamming from the next room even if you couldn’t hear the conversation there that preceded it.”

“Oh,” Erik says uselessly. “Uh…sorry.”

“It’s fine,” Charles says. “You’re not the first person to overcorrect in the presence of a telepath.”

Erik does look back at him then. He’s folded his arms across his chest, and he’s looking out at the somewhat unremarkable landscape of northern Connecticut.

“Have you…”

Charles looks at him questioningly, and Erik clears his throat.

“I was just wondering if you’d ever read that psionic theorist, Maria—”

“Uchida?” Charles lights up. “Yes, of course. Have you?”

Erik nods. “She’s got some really interesting ideas.”

“She does,” Charles says. He looks truly excited now. “Did you read her most recent book?”

“Not yet. It’s on my list.” Erik smiles and after a pause, he says, “Tell me about it?”

Charles grins. “Well, there’s a relatively complicated paradox at the heart of it…”

It’s dark by the time they pass New Haven, and traffic is starting to back up in both directions. Erik hates being inconvenienced as much as the next person—and he doesn’t particularly want to sit on I-95 for hours the day before Thanksgiving—but part of him does love the feel of all those cars, packed close together.

He’s not about to say that out loud, though. Instead he drums his fingers on the steering wheel and mutters, “This is what I get for leaving so late in the day.”

“I should text my sister,” Charles says, shifting to pull his phone out of his pocket. He cranes his neck, even though there’s nothing to see but a stretch of cars in the darkness. “It shouldn’t be too bad, right? We’re going in the opposite direction of most people.”

“Underestimating the appeal of giant balloons and high school marching bands, I see,” Erik says, and they both laugh.

Erik watches Charles send off the text, his face illuminated by the glow of the screen.

“Your sister’s a mutant,” he prompts. “Who holds separatist leanings?”

“A shapeshifter,” Charles says. “Who I’ve fought with about this stuff way more times than I have with you.”

“Hey,” Erik says teasingly. “We only met a few months ago. I have years to catch up.”

Charles laughs, but then there’s a long pause, and Erik wonders if he said the wrong thing.

“Anyway,” Charles says eventually. “As we get older we seem to be fighting less. I like to think it’s because Raven’s matured enough to see that actually, I was right about pretty much—”

“Ha,” Erik breaks in. “She’s probably just figured out better ways to manage you.”

Charles chuckles, and then a silence settles between them with a warmth that wasn’t there before.

Traffic continues at a crawl, but by the time they’ve crossed the bridge into Queens and are slowly inching towards Brooklyn, they’ve talked about their childhoods, Charles’s admittedly terrible-seeming family, and Erik’s parents, who Charles says sound “intimidating,” clearly the words of a man who’s never watched them argue over what the other person did with the remote while it’s sitting on top of the TV.

Charles’s sister apparently lives in Dumbo. As he drives carefully over the cobbled streets, Erik amends his vision of her as a cool shapeshifting radical, subtracting points for sheer pretension—though as he sinks into the expanse of steel in the bridges overhead, he decides to add some of them back.

Charles must have alerted her telepathically, because a figure comes running towards the car the second Erik pulls up to the curb. Perhaps not surprisingly, Charles failed to mention how attractive his sister was, with deep blue scales and a short red fade, wearing a leather jacket and matching pants that are so tight, they look painted on.

He rolls down the window and sticks out his hand. “Erik.”

“Raven,” she says, shaking it. She looks at him appraisingly and then says to her brother, “It all makes sense now.”

“Shut up, Raven.”

Erik looks at him. “What does?”

Charles claps him on the shoulder. “Thank you very much for the ride.”

“Is your chair in the trunk?” Raven opens the backseat door to pull out Charles’s suitcase and garment bag.

“Oh, allow me,” Erik says, making a little show of opening the trunk and lifting out the chair with his powers.

“Ah,” Raven says. “It _really_ makes sense now.”

“Thank you again!” Charles says loudly, opening the door and sliding gracefully into his chair.

He wheels around the front of the car to the sidewalk, where Raven deposits his things on his lap and then leans down to embrace him. When they part, Charles gives Erik a final little wave.

“Wait!” Erik calls out. “Will you need a ride back to Massachusetts?”

Raven waves a hand. “Oh, don’t worry about it. He’ll probably just hire a driver.”

Charles smacks her in the side.

“What?” Erik says.

“Happy Thanksgiving, Erik!” Charles shouts, and then he and Raven turn towards the entrance to her building.

Erik drives back to Queens the way they came. Traffic is just as bad as it was in the opposite direction, which gives him plenty of time to review the past few hours. They’d bickered a little, but mostly, they’d just talked, and Erik had spent a lot of time watching the way Charles’s face lit up and he gestured animatedly whenever the conversation turned to something he was especially passionate about.

He’s still smiling when he arrives at his parents’ house, though the smile dims a bit as he rings the bell and then opens the door to a darkened entryway—he’s several hours later than he’d said he’d be, and yet, nobody appears to be home.

There’s a note on the kitchen table in his mother’s slanted cursive. “Immigration rally. Foley Square. Dinner in fridge. Don’t wait up,” and a little drawing of a heart at the end.

Erik rolls his eyes and floats a beer out of the fridge. “Take one holiday off,” he says aloud to the empty kitchen. “Any holiday.”

He goes to bed before they come home, and yet somehow, his mother is already awake and brewing coffee when he stumbles downstairs the next morning. She grips hard as she hugs him, and then she pulls back, studying his face with a frown. “You look tired.”

He sighs and maneuvers around her to pour a cup of coffee. “Two jobs, remember?” He turns and leans against the counter, blowing on his mug. “Where’s Dad?”

“Oh, out for a run,” she says.

“For fuck’s sake,” he mutters. “Why can’t either of you take a day off?”

Whether his mother heard him or not, he’ll never know. Instead she says, “How was the drive down, then?”

“Slow,” he says, taking a sip of coffee. “I gave a ride to a colleague who was having car trouble. Someone from the Mutant Studies program.”

“Was it the new Biology professor?” his mother says, giving him a worryingly sly smile.

“How the hell do you know about that?”

“They send me the College magazine,” she says with a shrug, opening the fridge and pulling out ingredients for whatever he’s presumably going to be forced to cook in the next hour. “I read it.”

“Yes, well it was him,” he says warily. “Charles Xavier.”

“He’s very good looking, don’t you think?” she says conspiratorially as she shuts the fridge door.

Erik puts the coffee mug on the counter and covers his face in his hands.

Luckily, cooking a meal for fifteen people proves to be enough of a distraction that she doesn’t ask any further questions about Charles. His father comes back from his run and joins their prep work, only smirking slightly when he puts Erik on potato-peeling duty once again.

They’re nearly done cooking by the time the first guests ring the bell—a friend from his parents’ synagogue and her teenage daughter, followed shortly by his aunt and uncle. His request for child-free holidays was clearly overruled, and Rebecca’s children arrive already in tears. Erik says hello quickly and then ducks back into the kitchen to open the wine.

Of course that’s where Magda finds him hiding not long after.

“I thought you wanted to be closer to the knives,” she says, raising her eyebrows. “But now I’m wondering if you have a drinking problem.”

Erik raises his glass in a mock-toast. “It’s not my fault you have to do this sober.”

She looks both beautiful and alarmingly pregnant, though he’s pretty sure people don’t use the word “alarmingly” when describing a pregnant person. She settles at the kitchen table while he goes back to chopping, keeping one eye on the knife and one eye on her.

“You’ve been evasive in your emails,” she says. “So I have to assume either things are going better or you’ve actually murdered that professor and you’re trying not to draw attention to it.”

“Murdered who?” his mother says as she sweeps into the kitchen. “Magda, dear, you look so beautiful.” She leans down to give her a hug.

“Thank you, Edie,” Magda says. “And you haven’t heard about Erik’s arch-nemesis?”

His mother turns to him, her eyebrows drawn together. “Not that schmuck of a landlord—”

“No,” Magda cuts in. “Charles something?”

His mother’s eyebrows shoot up. “He’s your arch-nemesis and you’re driving him to the city?”

“You drove him to the city?” Magda says. “When?”

“Yesterday,” his mother says, turning back to Magda and placing a hand on her arm. In a stage whisper, she adds, “I think Erik is interested in him.”

Magda looks triumphant. “I said so in September!”

Erik picks up his wine glass and quickly ducks past them, saying over his shoulder, “Sorry, but I am not participating in this conversation.”

Out on the back steps, he immediately regrets not grabbing his coat—it has to be close to freezing. He looks back at the house and shakes his head; it’s not worth it to go back in there.

As he stares at the single tree in his parents’ little yard, he thinks about the past few months: his initial anger with Charles and his frustration that they had to work together, but then the slow, steady thaw since, until they’ve become something close to friends. And he’s happy to be Charles’s friend, he really is. But his confusion about Charles these past few weeks is finally crystalizing into a sort of clarity.

Erik’s never been shy about asking for what he wants, but Charles is a telepath. If he was actually interested in Erik—and if he’s been able to see that Erik was interested in him—wouldn’t he have said something?

He’s still staring at the tree when gets a text, and he floats his phone from his pocket. It appears to be two texts, actually, from a 914 area code, and not a number he’s saved in his phone. He opens the lock screen.

“Hi, this is Charles,” the message reads, with proper capitalization and everything. “Hope you don’t mind me texting. I just wanted to thank you again for the ride yesterday.” The second one reads, “Also hope your Thanksgiving is going well… I’m certain it’s more festive than mine’s been so far.”

Erik stares at the messages for a good two minutes with what’s certainly a goofy smile on his face. There’s nothing especially personal about them. Charles didn’t even include an emoji. And yet.

“Text from your boyfriend?” Magda says, knocking him lightly on the back of the head. She slowly makes her way down the steps to the little cement path in front of him, and then she eyes the steps skeptically. “If I sit next to you, I’m not sure I’ll be able to get up.”

Erik stands quickly, shoving the phone back in his pocket. “A text from my _colleague_ , actually.”

“Uh huh,” she says, smiling. “So this is the part where I remind you about that important speech I gave on this very spot not two months ago—”

“Where you called me rigid,” Erik cuts in. “I remember.”

“Ah yes, Erik Lehnsherr, the man who never forgets an insult,” she says, rolling her eyes. “You might also recall that I said your very principled stances sometimes keep you from changing—even when you clearly no longer agree with your past self.” She nudges him in the side. “Seems relevant right now, huh?”

He wants to snap back that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about—that she’s jumped to ridiculous conclusions. But then he thinks of Charles, sitting in the passenger seat and waving his arms around as he talks about DNA sequencing. He looks at Magda and sighs.

“What happens when you do change your mind? How do you let people know?”

Magda smiles and shakes her head. “I imagine it was that mouth of yours that got you into trouble in the first place.” She stretches up to kiss him on the cheek. “Try and use it for good.”

*

Erik is the last of the Mutant Studies faculty to arrive at Alex’s hearing, which is being held in a seminar room with a massive, U-shaped wooden table in the center. He slips into the only seat left, near the middle of one side, next to Logan. Charles is at the very end, and it’s the first time Erik’s seen him since their drive to New York; he leans over to give Erik a wave, and Erik waves back.

The disciplinary panel—three faculty members, two administrators, all of them baseline, as far as Erik is aware—is seated at the head of the table, with Alex immediately to their right, dressed in a shirt and tie and looking like he’s going to be sick. No other students were allowed in, apparently, not even to advocate for their classmate, which Erik thinks is a pretty terrible policy, though it was too late to do anything about it by the time he found out.

And immediately to the panel’s left, Porter is sitting with his arms folded, looking simultaneously smug and bored. He notices Erik and nods in his direction, and then he leans over to whisper something in the ear of the panel member seated next to him. Erik frowns.

Logan snorts and says under his breath, “Now that was subtle.”

Seated in the center of the panel, the Dean of Students claps her hands together and says, “I think we’re all here now—let’s get started.”

The Dean outlines Alex’s offenses, and the two members of the panel who weren’t on the initial disciplinary committee pause her every so often to ask Alex clarifying questions. Erik has to give the kid credit—if it were him at this age, he would have been shouting at them within five minutes. Hell, it _had_ been him at this age, and sometimes he didn’t even wait five minutes.

But when they get to the administration’s punishment—expulsion, per Porter’s recommendation—the Dean turns to look at Porter with a frown. “I respect my colleagues’ judgement, but that seems somewhat disproportionate to the incident, I have to admit.” She gestures at Alex, who’s studying the table intently. “What happened that night was clearly an accident.”

Porter puts on an obviously fake expression of sympathy. “Absolutely true,” he says. “But actions do have consequences, I’m afraid.” He pauses, and then he adds, “I think it’s clear that by virtue of the powers he possesses, Mr. Summers is inherently dangerous—and yet he chose to drink alcohol to excess that night. Who knows what could have happened—or what could happen next time?”

“Oh, come on.”

They all turn to look in surprise—and Erik might be the most surprised of all, because the person who spoke was Charles.

The Dean peers at Charles over her glasses. “I’m sorry, Professor Xavier, do you have something to add?”

“My apologies,” Charles says, his cheeks flushed bright pink. “I don’t mean to speak out of turn, and I’m certainly aware that I’m the newest faculty member in this room. But Alex is my student and I can’t let this blatant anti-mutant bias go unremarked-upon.”

The Dean looks at him impassively for a moment, and then she nods briefly for him to go on.

“An accident is an accident,” Charles says, making a decisive motion in the air. “And yes, some mutations can lead to more destructive accidents. The law is both complicated and nuanced when it comes to mutational variation and its effects.” He takes a deep breath, and then he looks right at Porter as he says, “But to suggest that Alex himself is inherently dangerous…I think you’ll find that mutation is a protected class, Professor Porter, and comments like that are grounds for legal action.”

Erik sits back in his seat and tries not to grin. Porter looks furious, but the members of the panel—everyone but Porter’s friend, anyway—are nodding and making notes on their papers.

“He did drink alcohol to excess, though,” the other administrator says. “And he caused a good amount of damage. What would you recommend the punishment be?”

“What would you do if he’d set the lawn on fire with a match?” Charles says. “Both drunkenly and accidentally, that is.”

“Probation,” Ororo says, folding her arms across her chest. “With clear expectations about what any future offenses might mean.”

“This is outrageous,” Porter says, gesturing at Alex. “He did not light my lawn on fire with a match. He shoots lasers out of his chest. You don’t know what it’s like to live next to—to—” He glares at Erik. “ _Them_.”

Erik just smiles, and then he picks up his pen with his powers and spins it in a circle.

 _Just fucking wait until you have tenure_ , Charles projects in a sing-songy voice in his head.

Erik nearly jumps in surprise, but after a moment, he grins, glancing over at Charles, who’s grinning in return.

“And this!” Porter says, pointing frantically at the pen. “Are you seeing this!”

The Dean gives him a flat look. “Scared of a floating pen, Tripp?”

Porter makes a spluttering sound as Erik floats the pen neatly back to the table.

“You make a very compelling argument—thank you, Professor Xavier,” the Dean says, nodding at Charles. “If you’ll give us a moment to confer.”

A low murmur breaks out in the room as the panel gathers closer to deliberate.

“Told you Chuck was an interesting guy,” Logan says.

Erik just snorts and shakes his head. He remembers that moment months ago, when he speculated that Charles wouldn’t think Porter was so bad, and he laughs outright.

At the end of the table, Charles is just sitting there, smiling, and Erik waits until they make eye contact and then gives him a big thumbs up.

After a relatively short deliberation period, the Dean of Students calls for silence, and then she looks sternly at Porter. “I must say that I agree with Professor Xavier, Tripp: while Mr. Summers should be punished for his actions, invoking such discriminatory language and ideas puts you—and the College—on dangerous ground.”

Porter looks murderous, but the Dean ignores him, turning back to Alex.

“Mr. Summers, I’m rescinding your expulsion—you are now on probation until further notice. And I’d like to sincerely apologize for the initial judgment of this incident.” She casts a side glance at Porter’s friend. “We’ll be in touch to work out the details of your probation.” She closes the folder in front of her decisively and says, “Thank you, everyone. We’re adjourned.”

Alex is beaming. He shoots out of his seat and rushes over to their corner, thanking each of them profusely in turn. Porter is tugging at the sleeve of his friend and hissing in his ear as they hurry towards the exit. 

Erik slides past Ororo and Jean until he’s standing next to Charles, and he tentatively places a hand on his shoulder.

“That was…quite brilliant.”

Charles laughs. “I thought I’d try being political for a change.”

“For a beginner,” Erik says. “You’re weirdly good at it.”

They stare at each other for a moment, still smiling, and then suddenly, Erik feels extremely awkward, quickly removing his hand from Charles’s shoulder and shoving it in his pocket.

After a beat, Charles says, “I’ll see you at the Mutant Mingle on Friday, then?”

Erik nods. “I’ll be there.”

He spends the next several days replaying the image of Charles scolding Porter into oblivion, flushed with anger, eyes flashing—generally looking…extremely good.

But that doesn’t help him figure out what the hell he’s supposed to say to Charles the next time he sees him—or if he should say anything at all.

The night of the Mutant Mingle, he puts on one of his better suits—sharp, but not too formal, lest he look like he’s trying too hard at an event hosted by a bunch of undergraduates who continue to run naked past his window at all hours.

Someone rings his doorbell, and he opens the door from his bedroom as he continues to adjust his tie.

“You just let me in without seeing who I was?” Jean calls out. “I could’ve been a murderer or—wow, are you trying to give him a heart attack?”

Erik turns and gives her a withering look. She holds up her hands.

“OK, so I’m not saying I’ve been eavesdropping on both of you for weeks, but…” she says, her expression bordering on sheepish. “Let’s just say: you don’t have to try this hard.”

Erik perches on the edge of his bed, burying his head in his hands. “If he’s so interested in me, then why hasn’t he said anything?”

She gives him a quizzical look. “Because you haven’t said anything to him,” she says slowly, in a tone that suggests she thinks he’s extremely stupid.

“Is this telepath logic?”

Jean laughs. “Yes, actually,” she says. “Of course we can see when you’ve changed your mind. But that doesn’t mean too much unless you say so out loud.”

She leaves him sitting on the bed, frowning.

“I’m going to drink more of this bourbon!” she calls out from the kitchen.

They make the hundred-foot journey to Mutant Haus about an hour later. The front door is propped open, and what feels like an almost palpably festive aura pours out of the entryway.

“Empath,” Jean confirms with a smile. “And a really great party trick, I’ve got to talk to her.”

“Professors!” Hank says as they cross through the threshold. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thanks for having us, Hank,” Erik says, glancing over to the large common room on their right, festooned in little twinkling lights and generally decorated in what seems to be a determinedly secular winter theme. “Excellent decorating scheme, by the way.”

Hank gives him a tentative smile. “We try.”

He points them towards the liquor table, where a student with a long, curling tail is ostensibly playing bartender, though it mostly seems to be more of a pour-your-own sort of situation.

“You weren’t kidding,” a familiar voice says from behind them. “Their booze selection is strangely impeccable.”

They turn to see Charles holding up a red plastic cup with a smile. He’s wearing a grey suit that’s even nicer than the one he wore at the Homecoming reception, topped off with a cobalt-blue tie that brings out his eyes. He looks…

Jean pats him on the shoulder and mutters, “You can say it, you know.”

Erik ignores her. “What do you think? Did I describe it correctly?”

Charles glances around. “Yes, it’s lovely. Though it seems like half the faculty got invited.”

Erik raises his eyebrows. “That means half the faculty wasn’t invited, though.”

They all laugh, and Erik takes a sip from his own red cup—he risked the punch, which, to the students’ credit, does not skimp on the alcohol ratio.

He glances around the room and spots Ororo in gold sequins, standing in the corner with her fiancé and talking to a few other people from the History department. Logan is near the entryway, saying goodbye to a couple Erik doesn’t recognize as they head out the door. As loath as he is to admit it, in his black suit jacket and slim red tie, Logan looks pretty fucking fantastic.

“You know,” Jean says, gazing in his direction with a speculative look on her face. “Now that Logan and I are working so closely together, it might be nice to get to actually know each other…”

She stalks off towards him without saying goodbye. Erik glances at Charles, and they both burst out laughing.

When their laughter dies down, Charles raises his red cup. “Cheers?”

“What are we toasting?” Erik says, raising his own.

Charles cocks his head. “The end of the semester?”

Erik smiles. “How about you eviscerating Porter at that hearing?”

Charles flushes and looks away, but then he knocks their cups together all the same.

Erik downs the rest of his punch in one gulp. He feels momentarily woozy, but once the world rights itself, he leans a little closer and says, “Look, can I talk to you for a moment?”

They spend five minutes trying every room on the ground floor, but there are students in the kitchen and students in the pantry, and when they walk into the laundry room, a pair of students are rounding third base on top of one of the dryers.

“Isn’t this their dorm?” Charles hisses as they quickly retreat back into the hall. “Don’t they have their own rooms? With locks?”

They eventually find what’s possibly the only deserted spot in all of Mutant Haus, a small porch at the back of the building. He sits gingerly on a beat-up floral armchair across from Charles, and he studies Charles’s features in the low light. His eyes are wide and his lips slightly parted—he looks beautiful, and Erik opens his mouth to say so.

Instead, what comes out is, “I’m an idiot.”

Charles wrinkles his nose. “You are,” he says after a moment. “But did you have to bring me outside to tell me that?”

Erik opens his mouth again, but then he leans forward to kiss him.

Charles freezes and lets out a small noise of surprise, but after a few seconds, he starts kissing back, surging forward and reaching out to grip Erik’s forearms tightly. Erik feels the press of his telepathy, soft at first, then more insistent, and as he opens his mouth to deepen the kiss, the sensation of Charles’s mind spills in, a rush of hot, pulsing desire.

“Wait, wait,” Charles says after a moment, breathing heavily as he pushes Erik back slightly. “Say what you wanted to say.”

Erik stares at him. “This is what I wanted to say.”

“You really are an idiot,” Charles mutters. “I’ve known, OK? I’ve known all along. Even when you didn’t know yourself.”

Erik frowns. “Known what?”

Charles rolls his eyes. “I’ve wanted you since the second I saw you at that table in the coffee shop—and don’t tell me you didn’t feel the same, because I’m an extraordinarily powerful telepath.”

Erik blinks at him. “OK.”

“And then we had that awful fight and I pushed and pushed even though you were clearly upset.” He pauses and takes a deep breath. “And then a few days later when I was out for drinks with Jean for the first time, I peeked in her mind and saw that you were friends…so I asked her to invite you to join us.”

He only has a vague memory of what Charles is talking about, so he repeats, “OK.”

“You were apparently ‘extremely stoned,’ in Jean’s words, so I figured I’d try again another time,” Charles continues. “And then…”

“…I shouted at you in Moira’s office,” Erik finishes.

Charles nods. “You spent several months aggressively hating everything about me while blasting thoughts about how attractive you found me from your subconscious.” One corner of his mouth quirks upwards. “It was confusing.”

Erik shakes his head. “Why are you telling me this?”

Charles shrugs. “Neither of us have been particularly honest. I’m trying to change that.” He pauses and says, “Because even when you were shouting at me, my feelings never changed. If anything, the more you shouted—and the more I listened to your infuriating ideas—the more I seemed to like you…” He glances down at his lap. “Which was incredibly annoying, to be honest.”

Erik stares at him for a moment and then lifts his chin up, leaning in to kiss him again—but Charles places a finger on his lips to stop him.

“Your turn.”

Erik pulls back with a frown. “I’m not sure what you want me to say. I’m not good at this.”

Charles raises an eyebrow. “I’ve noticed.”

Erik sighs. “I made a snap judgement, all right? I do it all the time and usually it doesn’t matter—”

“I feel like it probably actually does but I’m going to let you continue.”

“—and you’re right,” he finishes. “I decided to hate you and that was that. It didn’t matter what you did from that point on.”

Charles smiles. “Until it did again.”

“Yeah, well.” Erik looks down and takes one of Charles’s hands in his. “I’m sorry, all right.” He shakes his head. “You didn’t even have to force an apology out of me this time.”

Charles squeezes his fingers, smiling softly. “OK, you have permission to stop talking now.”

He cranes his neck to bite gently at Erik’s lower lip before leaning in to kiss him properly, wrapping his free hand around the back of Erik’s head to pull him closer. His mouth parts and Erik presses in and—

“ _Holy shit_.”

They pull apart quickly and look up to see a cluster of students—Darwin, Alex, and Hank among them—crowding in the doorway, looking everywhere from gleeful to horrified.

“Hey, so uh…” The curly-haired one who Erik is pretty sure is responsible for the drunken sonic blasts holds up a plastic bag and a glass pipe. “You’re totally welcome to stick around and _mingle_ , if you know what I mean. That’s what the Mutant Mingle is all—”

“No,” Erik says quickly. “We’re going.”

“Alex,” Charles says with a warm smile. “I’m so glad to see that you’re back.”

Erik tugs Charles’s arm as he stands and heads towards the door. “We’re going!” he repeats, louder this time. “C’mon, Charles.”

The students shuffle out onto the porch as Erik steps back to let Charles wheel inside first.

“I thought he was dating Professor Grey?” one of them whispers.

“No!” another whispers. “He’s gay.”

“Not him—the other one.”

“Goodnight, gentlemen,” Erik says loudly as he steps back into the building, pulling the door firmly shut with his powers.

Charles looks up at him with a sly smile. “Do you want to get out of here?”

Erik smiles in return. “My place is…” He gestures vaguely in the direction of his apartment.

Charles shakes his head. “What if I told you I know a place that’s, at a minimum, three blocks from any students.”

“Sounds perfect,” Erik says with a laugh, and then he lets Charles lead him towards the door.


End file.
